March 2019
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. I’ve just finished going over proofs for The Moving Out: Collected Early Poems, due out momentarily from Salmon Poetry. For more information, visit my website: www.johnmorganpoet.com
NOTE: Rather than choose a single best poem, I’ve taken a favorite from each of my first three collections.
NOTE: Rather than choose a single best poem, I’ve taken a favorite from each of my first three collections.
“Spring Afternoon” was written during the Viet Nam war. It’s a love poem as well as a war poem, influenced perhaps by the slogan, “Make Love Not War.”
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.
After going through a rough period on the job, I found myself in a much happier situation and wrote "The Moving Out." Although it was written well before I relocated to Alaska, it seems to foresee that move.
THE MOVING OUT
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 SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, 1941-42," in the voice of a seventeen-year-old girl, was written after reading Harrison Salisbury’s book, The 900 Days, which deals with one of World War II’s lesser known horrors.
THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, 1941-42
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.
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.
After going through a rough period on the job, I found myself in a much happier situation and wrote "The Moving Out." Although it was written well before I relocated to Alaska, it seems to foresee that move.
THE MOVING OUT
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 SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, 1941-42," in the voice of a seventeen-year-old girl, was written after reading Harrison Salisbury’s book, The 900 Days, which deals with one of World War II’s lesser known horrors.
THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, 1941-42
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.
“Spring Afternoon” first appeared in the magazine Choice.
“The Moving Out” first appeared in The Iowa Review.
“The Siege of Leningrad, 1941-2” first appeared in the Denver Quarterly.
© 2018 John Morgan
“The Moving Out” first appeared in The Iowa Review.
“The Siege of Leningrad, 1941-2” first appeared in the Denver Quarterly.
© 2018 John Morgan
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