Rusty Morrison
Commonplace

Thickening drone of cicada pools in my inner ear—a density
equivalent to drowning, a viscosity I liken to this craving
for a response from my dead.

A breath drawn to the edge of lung’s expansion
needn’t immediately fall back,
but might examine expansion’s oblivion.

A weave of wind rushes against my ear;
if the wicker were only wide enough to offer hand- and foot- holds,
I’d climb out of the body’s briar.

Mating the silence in grief to the shudder
of pushing a muscle to the point of exhaustion
—I listen to what gestates.

 

Commonplace

Trusting in namelessness
cools the hot light of interrogation that suffused my every attempt
to call back the names of my dead.

A proper name can fuse too easily with its cache of broken watches,
empty purses, dry cap-less pens,
confusing endlessness with my roster of its tangible equipment.

A sun, erasing sky as it falls,
can’t look back at what it’s blinded, and gone blind to; an already-crossed torrent
will countenance no further drowning within it.

Pressing my face into a warm cloth, resting after a flight of stairs,
slipping on wet pavement but catching myself—all the acts without names,
where whatever is nameless has room to expand.

 

Commonplace

Infesting clear-cuts, barren avalanche tracks, burned-out riverbanks—fireweed
is finding in each disaster or abandonment
the best porosity in which to breed.

A missed premonition can fertilize
a future instinct; rasp of the screen door this morning, what didn’t I hear
shut behind me?

A shear cliff-wall of time between each ring in the trunk’s hidden grain
—a whole life to see that each irrevocable limit predicts the shape
that will supersede it.

Landing at dusk on the same tree branch, which seems to levitate to meet them,
two dark birds suspend shape
for shapelessness, which enlarges to include them.