Anniversary 2

Understanding comes in waves and whether waves come
too breathlessly fast or dawdle conscionably
out of the future or the past,
it doesn't matter, everything adding up and cancelling out.
From the golden fields of youth and Need
through the inexplicable let-downs of passing time,
evolve differently, often,
than the ways we expect them to.
Purity is all.

Mother, beauty
worthy to be sculpted by Pisano,
you thought you had a hotline to God;
in fact, you did,
via the cable of infinite trust.
Many imagine righteousness a bulwark against evil.
It isn't always. Still others say you get what you deserve.

Deserve? Ditch that awful habit
of saying what others deserve:

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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Elephant's Graveyard

So, here it is:
the end of all journies, all that chilly sweat,
of quagmires breached, of tendrils torn and elbowed aside,
glassy centipedes, mosquitoes, sizey as birds,
able to drain small children in one draught,
turbine loud and wingeing with thirst;

Deadly snakes everywhere you step off,
pards clearing their throats, the glowing eyes
of hyenas circling the campfire;
flying foxes, living caprices out some equatorial Goya,
with good, sharp teeth and copious saliva.

Malaria, fever, hunger, diarrhea-
Harkening to hearsay, it being found on no map,
in a language not your own, by a treacherous guide.
All the stuff of legend, rather, even fantasy.
Suddenly,

though never before being there, you recognize it-

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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Uprisings

Up slides the blind and out of remotest heaven
from a perlmutter sky
falls the pure, the Brownian, upward drifting snow
casually but surely, in high-blown whorls;
on the rail has settled a bluish inch.
'It's cold', croaks the bird, on yellow, thin legs,

so I rise. Snow fills last years rifts and sifts
on sticks and galls and nodes of last years'
pride, the dormant window boxes;
Outside you can almost hear it breathe;
It seethes, that bush
that stays green all the winter.

A day. To pass. A day to pass
till sleeping time, again, and blinded once more,
to sleep between footboard and bedstead; only snow-
penniless, homeless, less all
those things that fellow in the Citroen specified needing
hurtling down-Rhine, years ago, breeding

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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A Simple Awakening

Birdsong. From no lone singer but multitudes-
Breaching the shutters, the curtain's hem
Choristers of indeterminate hue, because viewless-
Canzone spilling over the sill,
A tree branched with pure gold, doubtless, their oratory,
Casting a silver shadow.

Another perfect day. Like someone still with air aplenty
Launched, flutter-kicking, from the floors of sleep
Through quivering blue toward a shimmering scrim
He cannot see past, I glide-
The distance not so great, no need to hurry.
Golden-that is the morning

I must enter, eventually, reluctantly.
Sleep was nice and full of visitor fishes, who
Vanish when you try to feed or obligate them in any way
But this is, after all, the novel day
Full of choices-chances to improve the past and
Tool the future.

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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Eustace Tilley In Heaven I

Insincere, they said,
Your heart is forever vanishing, going out of sight
returning each night to its violable branch,
its enchanted wood. Like a firefly it beckons. Ha!
I set my course. It disappears. Appears again
somewhere in the well, in a new direction,
then again, no longer the fire. Quark
dark and cold the altarstone, re-reminding me that I, too,
have lingered long on twilight benches in city parks
as the moon linked itself to the night,
tapping my spats lightly on stone to indicate-what?
Interest? Impatience? Let's have a drink, go to bed,
and then, perhaps, a good dinner.

In time I did die and went to heaven-surprise!
even a caricature must, you know, go in ruffs,
in discreet whiffs, up the nostrils of the gods.
There, toeing the mark, was Nature's advocate.
Here it is harder to be critical.
The butterflies are of a golden hue. Remember butterflies?

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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Mermaid

Yet, there it as-
An image composed of droplets mustering into focus
Reversible. Itself of itself the watery isomer.
Idea given substance, however tenuous and fading-
Tail, head, tail, tail, head.
An ancient enigma, certainly not pretty
But in sum, bewitching.
Had it power over flesh, could it see me?
Only indirectly, I recalled, as in the water's mirror,
And I must desire it first.
'Choose', said the hologram, sternly, from its higher station.
It was as if a hand had suddenly cupped my head.
But what part of the mermaid was I?
The muscular tail that could knock a man clear
Across a quarterdeck, against the rail?
A treacherous tail with a fornix?
Dumbly pummeling the floorboards, waterborne no more,
Spectral hues revived with a bucket of sea-water
Sparkled like a Roman grotto?
Judgement recoiled from the notion.

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Elephant's Graveyard III

Sanctified by elephants since time began-
elephants who accept their end uncomplainingly
with relief and nary a snivel
having long ago made it a point to live their lives well
and confident of this just repose.

'Oh, my God, ' you think, 'all the ivory.'
Ivory laying about, half-sunk, everywhere
strewn, grass-entangled, trip-you-up ivory,
because that's what's left of an elephant, after a bit-
after a century or so, that's quite all that's left,
a tusk of ivory bearing in this respect

a sharp resemblance to a man's poetic toil
or the opera-ticket stub found in his breast pocket
by his grand-child, rummaging in the attic
a century after the time when the music stopped
and stopped forever, never to again resume;

toppled stalagmites of ivory, some taller than a man,

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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The First Time

The first time I told my poor father
that I intended to become a poet, come what may,
like John Greenleaf Whittier and many another
it was the morning of the day.
The sun threw a bucket of light lightly
over the grey shale flags, a white screen for the leaves
to finger-signal. The trees shimmered and sang mightily.
It was the Main Line. He had made it.

All the greeny shrubs in the dark little plots stood stock still
listening to overhear what he might say-
The day lilies nodded and lent ear.
Would he be angry? Would he sing goddam?
Would he look at me like I was a fool, an abomination?
the despair of his life? Something to obscure?
Suggest, again,
with crisp, hopeful conviction
that I take flying lessons?
'Quem, tu, Melpomene, semel'
Lo. he did not swear, stamp his foot,

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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An Eccentric II

Was she ever married? Surely you'll want to know.
Yes and no being the precise answer:
yes, to a man who died of colon cancer-
to him she proved a good and prudent wife;
but, no, it was all remedial. The real love of her life

was a viscount who vanished
during a bombing mission over the continent-
or was it the Pacific? T'was him lent
her life it's strange trajectory-
it's sad 'sic transit Gloria' quality.

No, she couldn't forget her lost aviator.
Wrote, you might say, till she was blue
the world over for a clue
to his whereabouts. Was he tortured?
Was he ever, mangled, found? Succumb to some

lonely impulse to leave his life behind-
including among it's jetsam, her?

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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Erotification

Not rough like a train wreck or a car wreck
or loud like a cat fight or two neighbors
shouting angrily across an alley by night
about nothing much at all; but quietly, more

like rain perturbs the leaves, or falling snow,
or calcium hardening a bone
changing, re-arranging, like a diamond pressed from a coal
over eons, invisibly, underground,

do you proceed, gentle Erotification,
subtly filling the vacuoles of the father, the mother-love-
that Elder deemed by the shrewd child
a better bet for trust and apprehension

as hormones quicken (for wouldn't a foal rather run
proudly under the flick of a whip
then idle all the dull day in the barn
tied, unbroken, by it's parent's side?) ,

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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