September 2021
Bio Note: 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 seven books of poetry, as well as a collection of essays. I’m also an occasional contributor to V-V Talk, most recently a short piece on the unusual Japanese form, the zuihitsu.
Off the Flyway
Three ducks shuffle up from a snow-melt
puddle across from the Pumphouse bar
and failing to look both ways—or either
way—saunter blithely onto asphalt.
Two gloss-green and one gray-brown, all clueless
to the looming danger cars at sixty
pose. So as baffled traffic piles up
behind, I brake, honk, stutter to a stop—
when finally my racket turns a head.
Befuddled flaps and squawkings as wings spread
and feathers skim the windshield making for
the breath-light vault above the creek-side bar
where distant flocks and brooding speculations
unfurl a landscape where no people are.
Mt. Rusty Cars
Tanana Lakes, Fairbanks, Alaska
The orange metal of abandoned axles, crumpled
hoods, radiators, fenders and parts unknown
like some cubist apocalypse after a war—
cars totaled on bourbon rollovers at three a.m.,
stockcars run off the track, pickups sliding
on icy pavements into a tree, or
the bloody upshot of a road-crossing moose,
all roped off and piled in a hillock, rust-orange
and brown on which a swallowtail
lazes taking in sun and where a sign
incised in birch declares with a wink,
“Mt. Rusty Cars,” just as we hear
a fisherman shout, “Oh, shit!” for the big one
that slipped his hook. Our last time here
Ben spotted an eagle perched at the top
of a spruce. Now he’s moved on into
his grown-up life, and like the couple we were
in our early years, we tread a path of our own—
this morning’s walk meanders down
“Chickadee Lane”—taking our time and listening
to trills, a yellow-rumped warbler, and is that
a hermit thrush? Your cracked pelvis mended,
my prostate tumor tamed, yet they forewarn
like the riff you performed the other day
in a minor key, a requiem without divinity.
Last week a small plane went down in the hills
killing the pilot—the father of a friend—aged 81.
You say, “I don’t even plan to be driving
a car by then.” The whole of life comes
crashing to an end, but as the horizon angles in
precipitous, we cradle moments like these
as sunlight sparks through aspen and birch—
like holding a newborn granddaughter in your arms,
smelling her waxy scalp and kissing her sleepy eyes.
©2021 John Morgan
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