January 2024
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 eight books of poetry, as well as a collection of essays. My newest, The Hungers of the World: New and Collected Later Poems from Salmon Poetry joins The Moving Out: Collected Early Poems for a comprehensive gathering of my work.
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.
Denali Park Fall Drive-Through
This roadside nature was once wilderness, which now boasts campsites, toilets, rangers, rows of split-log benches by the lake. By the lake loud honks and squeaks, a skyey tumult. We look up where specks by the dozens swirl like streamers, sink, form rippling Vs, then lift and vanish into air as hundreds more, riding the thermals, circle toward Denali’s mass, a vast white humpback whale set off by craggy pyramids too tall for cranes to top. How thrilling, operatic, this sky teeming with birds blown in from the lonely tundra to greet the turning season—a frenzied, festive, taxis-in-Times-Square cacophony of cranes! One red capped pair skims low, long-necked, hooked beaks like spears with spindly trailing legs, then catching an updraft, rise into the sky’s blue brilliance seeking passage through.
©2024 John Morgan
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