April 2018
Born in New York City, in 1976 I moved with my family to Fairbanks, Alaska to teach for a year in the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. I’m still there. I’ve published six books of poetry, as well as a collection of essays. My work has appeared in The New Yorker and Poetry, among other journals.
ABOVE THE TANANA: SEPTEMBER
- for Robert Lowell -
The mountains, Deborah, Hess and Hayes,
like ghosts, step forward in white, recede
in angled grays. And thirty degrees from
south, a rainbow hangs a fickle swatch
above a stand of yellowed birch.
Aspen and birch still hold their leaves,
and every now and then a noisy motor boat
comes in, crushing its predecessor's waves.
The slough's low shine gives some of
this picture back—inverting trees and sky.
If art were simply mirroring,
I'm sure it does a better job than I. Alone
at early dusk with a last mosquito or two,
and one chilled, unexpected grasshopper,
my thoughts jump back to you—a rangy master,
making the commonplace and the uncommon
heart speak out in that adopted urbane
southern voice. Among the cautious intellects
at Harvard, you stood for something else.
I see your big hands shaping space,
your index finger stirring an imaginary cup,
and for a moment I can feel your crazy weight
lounging here beside me on this shelf. What
would you make of this jigsaw-puzzle picture
time and place: The river's autumn sweep,
so wide and low (the gulls and geese have left)
with dark gray sandy bars a few days shy of snow.
Great cloud-decked sky whose arch includes
a horse's mane, dark stippled fish, and
the charcoaled muscles of an open heart.
from Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika, published by Salmon Poetry
AT THE FARMHOUSE IN WEST BRANCH (1965)
- for Bob Grenier -
Your guests had to wade through
a pig-sty, so you’d greet us at the gate
and prod those massive porkers out of the way
with the handle of a broom.
In back of the rented house, we strolled
in the shade of walnuts and mused on
our trade, while you bagged the fallen fruit—
which wasn’t like stealing, you said,
since they’d only rot on the ground.
Inside, you laid out the treasures
you’d picked up last summer at Groliers,
the latest Ashbery teasers and another
little-known poet whose bare-boned
fluted quatrains, cold
as the Minnesota sky, you’d squint
and cackle at. You read the world
like that—through the eyes
of poetry—until sky and piglets and
walnuts (which Emily baked into pies)
unshackled my bookish soul
and my love began to unfurl
the first acceptable stanzas
I ever wrote, while Emily,
as her pregnancy advanced,
jotted on greasy napkins,
God knows how, the knock-out
poem of the year in the bitchy
fastidious voice of a mother sow.
from Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika, published by Salmon Poetry
LISTEN
No poems without objects
to discipline the muddle, but
a pond is not enough, nor is a tree
(call it a willow, yes, in its earliest
springtime yellow) leaning over that pond
full of the water of commiseration
sufficient.
And no other poem could ever replace
the one which might have cornered this moment,
now, when what I feel—all tangled up with the night
and the rain which has fallen, has
plonked through a rift in the roof-shingles
into a waiting bowl strategically placed,
each drip a syllable of moisture stating
itself succinctly but with overtones
whose meanings, sinister yet hopeful,
escape through the latticed darkness
which surrounds my life like mountains.
first published in Poetry
© 2018 John Morgan
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