TEN POEMS
SPRING AFTERNOON
We have fallen on the mattress
like foot-soldiers in soft mud,
the enemy making off
with our boots and automatics.
Bright butterflies grow from the head
of my wife, and my right hand
holds three caterpillars, as we lie
now in a forest. The sun
is silent like the silence
surrounding the alarm clock.
Light winged insects fly up
to a white ring in the top leaves.
Their green shadows spatter through ferns
and on our faces. But the war
returns like daybreak: tanks move in
throwing flames and we retreat into trees.
My wife, as a tree, her lower branches
caught by fire; buds explode into
dogwood, cherry blossom.
Then bells begin to sound and we
run toward a school-house at the wood's edge.
Elsewhere men race for air-raid shelters.
We dive into foxholes. We duck
behind mushrooms. They are shooting back.
Kiss me! My skin is burning, burning.
“Spring Afternoon” first appeared in the magazine Choice.
THE MOVING OUT John Morgan
After sunset when the grieving
move further into their grief
and the stars are revealed by their master, the darkness,
I have left the cities of the blind
along tracks straight and cold as the north.
Here I sit listening on the shore
of a white and glacial distance.
The voice of a girl like an opening flower
begins to curl forth from the inner shell of the mind.
So many nights I have waited.
In cities the darkness gobbled me up and spat me out,
my fears scuttled back and forth outside the door.
Now the first birds waken and peck among fresh snow.
The light begins to open
with a pink and icy whisper along her cheek.
“The Moving Out” first appeared in The Iowa Review.
THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, 1941-42 John Morgan
How boring at seventeen to have
responsibilities! My little
brother plays with boxes. Mother
and Aunt lie in the cold
back room too heavy to move.
I keep it closed because I know a rat
has visited their faces.
Last June when our German friends
decided to pay a call, I curled
at my rooftop post like
a cat staring into a bowl.
The blimps overhead were strange
white fish. In the light
that crept across the pole,
my friends and I read Pushkin.
At times it felt like me
drifting over the streets,
each roof, each silvery spire
in the midnight glow engraving
a past that was
learning to slowly disappear.
There are no cats left in
Leningrad. Some dogs are sausage,
some stew. All the men away
at the front the trolley tracks
run to—but no trains run.
My daily slice has sawdust filler.
Chewing on wood, on leather,
I think of caviar, those salt-sweet
jellies, but this girl's belly holds
only the melted snow
I tease the gnawing hours with.
Forget the noise and smoke—as if
everything you couldn't eat
had turned combustible—compared
with starving, bombs are
just a joke. What poet said
history is sister to hysteria?
Thank God, mother will never see
what happens next. Oh, Grief's a
baby! I saw him in the night. He was
all white, his arms up over his head
in panic, as if he couldn't breathe.
And as I reached to help
he fell down dead. Last January I
refused to pull my brother
on his sled. Now there's no
reason to refuse. One by one
I've watched the others go.
The roads are rutted, trees on
either side, white and fruitless.
Coming out of town, I saw a hill.
Closer—a leg cut off at the knee,
some frosted hair. It was a mountain
of bodies jutting into the sky.
Thousands strewn around the cemetery
gate, no one strong enough to hack
their holes in the frigid ground.
So many deaths can hardly be
serious! And now, tottering back,
I watch the others—those exhausted,
dutiful faces—shoving coffins,
dragging shrouded sleds, stumbling,
weak like me. One of them dropped
in the snow: pale blue skin
over the bones of her cheek.
And gazing into her beautiful
green glazed eyes, like shells,
there is no way to tell
which of us is living, which dead.
“The Siege of Leningrad, 1941-2” won second prize in the Denver Quarterly poetry competition.
SONNET OF THE LOST LABOR John Morgan
Comes a day at high spring when everything gluts.
The globules of fat within each cell burst
open and the ecstatic heat, seeding the air
with the damp odor of birth, oozes among the grass.
Came a voice like yours, calling me up the stairs
to where you sat in the bathroom, shaken,
leaking the blood our child had nested in.
I hug you again and feel your pain, lost labor:
the ache of birth six months too soon;
but as I approach that moment's stain, my eyes
haze over, my head begins to float.
At the sight of its blood, death red, sight
fails. You catch the little monster in a cup, save
it for the lab. Christ, Nancy, I am not so brave.
IN WHICH A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE MOON IS John Morgan
ECLIPSED BY CLOUDS AND A WHITE-TAILED
DEER BOUNDS OFF INTO THE WOODS
Friend, I give you this consolation:
our losses die with us.
It was
only last week or last year
you had imagined a clear deep pool
where jewel-like fishes sat
in perfect understanding. Only the rain
disturbed their clarity, but when you returned to the spot
it was not the same: it was yourself
in whom that rich and tragic place
called up the need to back away and stare
on emptiness, dusky, elusive,
and somehow hostile to the whole you sought,
a whole which continued to vanish
as you crept up lasso in hand. Trepidatious.
Frankly, the night is much too shifty for us,
but if there is an answer
perhaps the children have seen it glancingly from their windows
during a moment's silence in their secret play
as a cloud flits across the copper moon
and the white tail of a deer
flashes beyond the summer-house and disappears into the woods.
“In Which a Total Eclipse of the Moon…” won first prize in The Carolina Quarterly poetry contest.
A RENAISSANCE ALTARPIECE John Morgan
[Note: a Fifteenth Century altarpiece in Urbino, Italy by Paolo Uccello shows a Jewish family being captured and burned at the stake for the sacrilege of desecrating the host.]
Uccello painted them: a family bound
together to a tree-trunk post, staring
with horror down as flames leap up from
foot to calf to knee. Four horsemen on
the right display the flag of Rome. Across
from them, with faces glistening in the flame-
light, stand the helmeted guards who
trussed this family up and set them blazing.
Two boys, both red-heads, share their parents’
fate, while in the background—fields, a leafy
apple tree, farm houses, and a church.
The sky behind a neighbor castle town
is black. The merchant and his pregnant wife
and boys were damned for what they did to
desecrate the host. “Religion,” I once
told a Catholic friend, “makes good people better,
bad people worse.” Another panel illustrates
their crime. They cooked it in a pan until
it bled. The blood of Christ spilled out and ran
across the floor, and when it dribbled
underneath the door, they were exposed.
Have you ever fallen from the second
story window of a dream—the broken
glass, the silent floating scream? You’d think
at least the child in her womb could be
redeemed. Why would a Jewish merchant
be so hostile to the host? Why in
Urbino was this credited? What calculus
of feeling can elucidate this art, unless
it charts a program to annihilate
a race. Aghast, the baffled victims
stare at lizard flames that leap and leap.
“A Renaissance Altarpiece” first appeared in the anthology Noisy Water
MANNY PERL AND THE SECRET WISH John Morgan
Down the block, around the corner,
the longest walk I’d ever taken,
as he recited poems—Robert Service
and one called “Gunga Din,” It was Din, Din, Din,
With the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green--
then, taking my tiny hand, my grandfather
led me across the lawn right up to it.
He smoked rich Cuban cigars--
an aroma I can still call up—and sliding
the ring off of one, he slipped it
on my thumb, the only finger it fit,
like a wedding band, he joked.
The well had a bucket, a handle to turn,
but we didn’t turn it. Instead
he took a silver penny from
his pocket, one from the recent war,
and said I should make a wish and toss it in.
The well’s stones mounted all the way
to my chin, so he hoisted me up so I could see
the water, but I couldn’t think what
to wish for, since at that moment
the great adventure of my life seemed
just about complete. But he said again
that I should make a wish.
“But don’t tell me what you wish for,”
Manny warned, “that would spoil it.”
A scientist friend insists
there’s no proof that the past is real.
Our memories are full of errant turnings
and Yesterday’s gone, as the songsters
have it, Yesterday’s gone.
Only the present moment exists.
I couldn’t hear the splash
but I saw ripples spreading. They spread
their ecstatic joy across the years
right up to today. Today
I can’t remember what I wished for
and even if I did, I’m not allowed to say.
THE DRONE John Morgan
At the pond off Goldstream Road
mallards, a golden eye, two tundra swans,
and a drone so loud it drowns out thought.
Four chopper blades at the corners,
the skipper in fatigues manning his remote--
what use are binoculars against such noise?
But we all have our games, our toys. Annoyed
at our annoyance, he packs it in, packs it
into his pick-up and drives off, leaving us
to bird in peace, as it comes back to me:
once as a kid, I filled a cardboard tube
with the heads of kitchen matches, covered it
in tinfoil, counted down. Smoke, flames
spouting from the nozzle, amazingly
it blasted off. House-high. Tree-high. Small
as a pencil stub against the sky. And came down
in a neighbor’s yard, no damage done,
except when my mother missed her matches.
Don’t you ever do that again! she warned.
Today the universe grows wider than
we knew back then, as stars, our cosmic neighbors,
make their measured circuit of the night,
and I wonder if my days of rocket science
could have seeded me another life--
hidden in a bunker somewhere north of Vegas
targeting a village in the drone-filled Middle East,
a life of easy pickings, believing that
the dead don’t feel the blast that killed them or
their kids. X marks their graves. A path
less radical than poetry, this sweet deceiver,
that perhaps someday I’ll have to answer for.
MY PORTRAIT BY VAN GOGH John Morgan
He scores deep lines in my face, the ditches
I abhor, then brightens the blue and speckles
the whites of my eyes. He twists my aging lips
in a sardonic grin. “Don’t sit so still,”
he tells me, “it’s a lie.” Compliant, I take
out my pocket notebook, and begin
by noting how his hair in crimson knots
falls to the right and shows some scalp.
His apron’s full of random strokes—the reds,
the greens, ochre, and indigo of spattered paint
and where he’s wiped his brush—which now
he lays aside. His fingers lick dried blood.
A violent sensitive man who drinks a tun
a month and has the shakes. His visions of
the fires of hell absolve him for the flashy whores
he loves. My temperament is not like his.
My second thoughts are milder than my first
and then I think again. He laughs and spits
and tells me to sit still—“Jackass, hold your pose!”--
takes up a knife and scrapes away my nose.
STRAY THOUGHTS ON AGING John Morgan
Fairbanks, Alaska
Is everything new about getting old? Spring
and the melting snow, friends dropping away--
they sift underground, or washed by the wind
they circle the earth. Their names like chalk on
a blackboard pose the daunting equation of loss.
Yesterday I biked past the old beer and gun club,
rechristened “Hogwarts,” to the edge of the slough
where it joins the big river. No bridge for miles
but a flagpole with pennants to summon
a boat when somebody needs to cross.
These blustery afternoons, deceptive in their
beauty—bright hopes leading us on. Fish camp
and then a hundred empty miles to the range
where mountains like grandparents lounging
on hammocks span the horizon. Clouds
like winged lions--Assyrian. Is heaven open
for business on days like this? And cycling back,
a bull moose browsing the roadside willows
turns his head and stares. He’s like that difficult cousin
you can’t help liking despite his prickly ways.
Brain circuits, axon and synapse, maybe
we’ve got it all wrong, like those late night
sophomore sessions when a light went on
and suddenly everything changed. Are we
our physical bodies? Are we anything else?
If the body’s a river distilling the years,
then a time-lapse camera could track this life,
recording the snowballing wisps of decay, sloughed
skin and hair, like mayflies flitting, having their day,
while the waistline spreads like a delta toward the sea.
It leaves a glow, a whisper, a caress. Remember
that dusty floor we slept on before we owned
a bed? “But why do they call it sleeping?” you said.
Still there’s a pungence to this breeze, a whiff of bliss.
Is heaven open for business on days like this?
“Stray Thoughts on Aging” first appeared Crab Orchard Review
SPRING AFTERNOON
We have fallen on the mattress
like foot-soldiers in soft mud,
the enemy making off
with our boots and automatics.
Bright butterflies grow from the head
of my wife, and my right hand
holds three caterpillars, as we lie
now in a forest. The sun
is silent like the silence
surrounding the alarm clock.
Light winged insects fly up
to a white ring in the top leaves.
Their green shadows spatter through ferns
and on our faces. But the war
returns like daybreak: tanks move in
throwing flames and we retreat into trees.
My wife, as a tree, her lower branches
caught by fire; buds explode into
dogwood, cherry blossom.
Then bells begin to sound and we
run toward a school-house at the wood's edge.
Elsewhere men race for air-raid shelters.
We dive into foxholes. We duck
behind mushrooms. They are shooting back.
Kiss me! My skin is burning, burning.
“Spring Afternoon” first appeared in the magazine Choice.
THE MOVING OUT John Morgan
After sunset when the grieving
move further into their grief
and the stars are revealed by their master, the darkness,
I have left the cities of the blind
along tracks straight and cold as the north.
Here I sit listening on the shore
of a white and glacial distance.
The voice of a girl like an opening flower
begins to curl forth from the inner shell of the mind.
So many nights I have waited.
In cities the darkness gobbled me up and spat me out,
my fears scuttled back and forth outside the door.
Now the first birds waken and peck among fresh snow.
The light begins to open
with a pink and icy whisper along her cheek.
“The Moving Out” first appeared in The Iowa Review.
THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, 1941-42 John Morgan
How boring at seventeen to have
responsibilities! My little
brother plays with boxes. Mother
and Aunt lie in the cold
back room too heavy to move.
I keep it closed because I know a rat
has visited their faces.
Last June when our German friends
decided to pay a call, I curled
at my rooftop post like
a cat staring into a bowl.
The blimps overhead were strange
white fish. In the light
that crept across the pole,
my friends and I read Pushkin.
At times it felt like me
drifting over the streets,
each roof, each silvery spire
in the midnight glow engraving
a past that was
learning to slowly disappear.
There are no cats left in
Leningrad. Some dogs are sausage,
some stew. All the men away
at the front the trolley tracks
run to—but no trains run.
My daily slice has sawdust filler.
Chewing on wood, on leather,
I think of caviar, those salt-sweet
jellies, but this girl's belly holds
only the melted snow
I tease the gnawing hours with.
Forget the noise and smoke—as if
everything you couldn't eat
had turned combustible—compared
with starving, bombs are
just a joke. What poet said
history is sister to hysteria?
Thank God, mother will never see
what happens next. Oh, Grief's a
baby! I saw him in the night. He was
all white, his arms up over his head
in panic, as if he couldn't breathe.
And as I reached to help
he fell down dead. Last January I
refused to pull my brother
on his sled. Now there's no
reason to refuse. One by one
I've watched the others go.
The roads are rutted, trees on
either side, white and fruitless.
Coming out of town, I saw a hill.
Closer—a leg cut off at the knee,
some frosted hair. It was a mountain
of bodies jutting into the sky.
Thousands strewn around the cemetery
gate, no one strong enough to hack
their holes in the frigid ground.
So many deaths can hardly be
serious! And now, tottering back,
I watch the others—those exhausted,
dutiful faces—shoving coffins,
dragging shrouded sleds, stumbling,
weak like me. One of them dropped
in the snow: pale blue skin
over the bones of her cheek.
And gazing into her beautiful
green glazed eyes, like shells,
there is no way to tell
which of us is living, which dead.
“The Siege of Leningrad, 1941-2” won second prize in the Denver Quarterly poetry competition.
SONNET OF THE LOST LABOR John Morgan
Comes a day at high spring when everything gluts.
The globules of fat within each cell burst
open and the ecstatic heat, seeding the air
with the damp odor of birth, oozes among the grass.
Came a voice like yours, calling me up the stairs
to where you sat in the bathroom, shaken,
leaking the blood our child had nested in.
I hug you again and feel your pain, lost labor:
the ache of birth six months too soon;
but as I approach that moment's stain, my eyes
haze over, my head begins to float.
At the sight of its blood, death red, sight
fails. You catch the little monster in a cup, save
it for the lab. Christ, Nancy, I am not so brave.
IN WHICH A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE MOON IS John Morgan
ECLIPSED BY CLOUDS AND A WHITE-TAILED
DEER BOUNDS OFF INTO THE WOODS
Friend, I give you this consolation:
our losses die with us.
It was
only last week or last year
you had imagined a clear deep pool
where jewel-like fishes sat
in perfect understanding. Only the rain
disturbed their clarity, but when you returned to the spot
it was not the same: it was yourself
in whom that rich and tragic place
called up the need to back away and stare
on emptiness, dusky, elusive,
and somehow hostile to the whole you sought,
a whole which continued to vanish
as you crept up lasso in hand. Trepidatious.
Frankly, the night is much too shifty for us,
but if there is an answer
perhaps the children have seen it glancingly from their windows
during a moment's silence in their secret play
as a cloud flits across the copper moon
and the white tail of a deer
flashes beyond the summer-house and disappears into the woods.
“In Which a Total Eclipse of the Moon…” won first prize in The Carolina Quarterly poetry contest.
A RENAISSANCE ALTARPIECE John Morgan
[Note: a Fifteenth Century altarpiece in Urbino, Italy by Paolo Uccello shows a Jewish family being captured and burned at the stake for the sacrilege of desecrating the host.]
Uccello painted them: a family bound
together to a tree-trunk post, staring
with horror down as flames leap up from
foot to calf to knee. Four horsemen on
the right display the flag of Rome. Across
from them, with faces glistening in the flame-
light, stand the helmeted guards who
trussed this family up and set them blazing.
Two boys, both red-heads, share their parents’
fate, while in the background—fields, a leafy
apple tree, farm houses, and a church.
The sky behind a neighbor castle town
is black. The merchant and his pregnant wife
and boys were damned for what they did to
desecrate the host. “Religion,” I once
told a Catholic friend, “makes good people better,
bad people worse.” Another panel illustrates
their crime. They cooked it in a pan until
it bled. The blood of Christ spilled out and ran
across the floor, and when it dribbled
underneath the door, they were exposed.
Have you ever fallen from the second
story window of a dream—the broken
glass, the silent floating scream? You’d think
at least the child in her womb could be
redeemed. Why would a Jewish merchant
be so hostile to the host? Why in
Urbino was this credited? What calculus
of feeling can elucidate this art, unless
it charts a program to annihilate
a race. Aghast, the baffled victims
stare at lizard flames that leap and leap.
“A Renaissance Altarpiece” first appeared in the anthology Noisy Water
MANNY PERL AND THE SECRET WISH John Morgan
Down the block, around the corner,
the longest walk I’d ever taken,
as he recited poems—Robert Service
and one called “Gunga Din,” It was Din, Din, Din,
With the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green--
then, taking my tiny hand, my grandfather
led me across the lawn right up to it.
He smoked rich Cuban cigars--
an aroma I can still call up—and sliding
the ring off of one, he slipped it
on my thumb, the only finger it fit,
like a wedding band, he joked.
The well had a bucket, a handle to turn,
but we didn’t turn it. Instead
he took a silver penny from
his pocket, one from the recent war,
and said I should make a wish and toss it in.
The well’s stones mounted all the way
to my chin, so he hoisted me up so I could see
the water, but I couldn’t think what
to wish for, since at that moment
the great adventure of my life seemed
just about complete. But he said again
that I should make a wish.
“But don’t tell me what you wish for,”
Manny warned, “that would spoil it.”
A scientist friend insists
there’s no proof that the past is real.
Our memories are full of errant turnings
and Yesterday’s gone, as the songsters
have it, Yesterday’s gone.
Only the present moment exists.
I couldn’t hear the splash
but I saw ripples spreading. They spread
their ecstatic joy across the years
right up to today. Today
I can’t remember what I wished for
and even if I did, I’m not allowed to say.
THE DRONE John Morgan
At the pond off Goldstream Road
mallards, a golden eye, two tundra swans,
and a drone so loud it drowns out thought.
Four chopper blades at the corners,
the skipper in fatigues manning his remote--
what use are binoculars against such noise?
But we all have our games, our toys. Annoyed
at our annoyance, he packs it in, packs it
into his pick-up and drives off, leaving us
to bird in peace, as it comes back to me:
once as a kid, I filled a cardboard tube
with the heads of kitchen matches, covered it
in tinfoil, counted down. Smoke, flames
spouting from the nozzle, amazingly
it blasted off. House-high. Tree-high. Small
as a pencil stub against the sky. And came down
in a neighbor’s yard, no damage done,
except when my mother missed her matches.
Don’t you ever do that again! she warned.
Today the universe grows wider than
we knew back then, as stars, our cosmic neighbors,
make their measured circuit of the night,
and I wonder if my days of rocket science
could have seeded me another life--
hidden in a bunker somewhere north of Vegas
targeting a village in the drone-filled Middle East,
a life of easy pickings, believing that
the dead don’t feel the blast that killed them or
their kids. X marks their graves. A path
less radical than poetry, this sweet deceiver,
that perhaps someday I’ll have to answer for.
MY PORTRAIT BY VAN GOGH John Morgan
He scores deep lines in my face, the ditches
I abhor, then brightens the blue and speckles
the whites of my eyes. He twists my aging lips
in a sardonic grin. “Don’t sit so still,”
he tells me, “it’s a lie.” Compliant, I take
out my pocket notebook, and begin
by noting how his hair in crimson knots
falls to the right and shows some scalp.
His apron’s full of random strokes—the reds,
the greens, ochre, and indigo of spattered paint
and where he’s wiped his brush—which now
he lays aside. His fingers lick dried blood.
A violent sensitive man who drinks a tun
a month and has the shakes. His visions of
the fires of hell absolve him for the flashy whores
he loves. My temperament is not like his.
My second thoughts are milder than my first
and then I think again. He laughs and spits
and tells me to sit still—“Jackass, hold your pose!”--
takes up a knife and scrapes away my nose.
STRAY THOUGHTS ON AGING John Morgan
Fairbanks, Alaska
Is everything new about getting old? Spring
and the melting snow, friends dropping away--
they sift underground, or washed by the wind
they circle the earth. Their names like chalk on
a blackboard pose the daunting equation of loss.
Yesterday I biked past the old beer and gun club,
rechristened “Hogwarts,” to the edge of the slough
where it joins the big river. No bridge for miles
but a flagpole with pennants to summon
a boat when somebody needs to cross.
These blustery afternoons, deceptive in their
beauty—bright hopes leading us on. Fish camp
and then a hundred empty miles to the range
where mountains like grandparents lounging
on hammocks span the horizon. Clouds
like winged lions--Assyrian. Is heaven open
for business on days like this? And cycling back,
a bull moose browsing the roadside willows
turns his head and stares. He’s like that difficult cousin
you can’t help liking despite his prickly ways.
Brain circuits, axon and synapse, maybe
we’ve got it all wrong, like those late night
sophomore sessions when a light went on
and suddenly everything changed. Are we
our physical bodies? Are we anything else?
If the body’s a river distilling the years,
then a time-lapse camera could track this life,
recording the snowballing wisps of decay, sloughed
skin and hair, like mayflies flitting, having their day,
while the waistline spreads like a delta toward the sea.
It leaves a glow, a whisper, a caress. Remember
that dusty floor we slept on before we owned
a bed? “But why do they call it sleeping?” you said.
Still there’s a pungence to this breeze, a whiff of bliss.
Is heaven open for business on days like this?
“Stray Thoughts on Aging” first appeared Crab Orchard Review