A KIND OF APOLOGY
When you rise and the streetlight leaking in catches you,
your hair swinging down, your breasts shifting, I hear
the tumbling piano notes of Weekend Edition
and think of Liederman finding them after years
of wandering through plenitude of possibilities,
how he must have felt the rightness, the beauty, the way
they would lead like stairs to new places. As I watch you,
the true and false of you, all shades of gray in dim
pre-dawn half-light, your clothes slowly covering you
like leaves of the Japanese maples opening
each spring over its gray skeleton, its bare limbs
refreshed in green, alive anew, a miracle
either way, unclothed or clothed, I feel my own
body a ruin shipwrecked on the shoal of sleep, music,
your music, playing in my head, solo piano,
patient, definite, going somewhere. And then, over
the music, come the sounds of your clothes, the swish and slide,
and the shadow of your shoes in silent arc, and all
the while I feign sleep, the still-life of the comatose
or dead, as if in all our not talking I have lost
the words you need in this double time, both fast and slow.
No more than derelict question, a disappointment
to us both, a rumpled mistake you made and will leave,
I will hold that swell of piano notes and hear it
repeat and repeat. I feel it lodging in me now.
TO THE EX
Would it surprise you to know
that I have stopped looking for you
even though I think of you
every day and every night?
I see you often from the corner
of my eye, turning aisle end
your skirt hesitating then swinging
after you in Safeway, more skirt
than you really, all motion, or
your index finger coming to your lips
crosswise like the lip plate
in the headjoint of your flute,
that space between your knuckles
resting against them, stilling them,
or bob and weave of your hair,
your head averted, withdrawing.
Each time something quickens in me,
something I control now, restrain
instead of chase. And, quick as you disappear,
as the instant impulse to pursue
and grab subsides, the shame rises,
regret and memory holding hands
and barefoot on a bed of broken shells.
The things I did and didn’t mean
but did and did again, a dumb
animal on instinct thoughtless,
angry. What I wouldn’t give
to undo each sluggish billow of blood
that spread and colored over days,
to unbreak the delicate dreams
that framed you, light and hollow,
a bird’s fluttering inside,
to unplant the fear I buried
in you like fists of bulbs always
waiting. What I wouldn’t do.
IN MEDIA RES
he was on me, in me, a not too rhythmic
baseline, his hands in my hair, at my neck,
his lips on mine, on the curve of my cheeks,
right, left, right, then my forehead, and he might
have been speaking, mumbling words between
or inside kisses, a breathy blessing
moistly warm on my skin, the benediction
of long marriage, of noontime assignation
with kids in school, his weight on his elbows,
another blessing, my hands on his waist,
my legs up, around, heels hooking his legs,
and I am thinking about riding the horse
my best friend from high school had, a wide bay,
when the phone begins to ring, always the way,
ringing, ardor interrupted, ringing,
no moment just for us, ringing, then
the machine picks up, our kids sing their message,
and my mother’s voice is screaming my name,
screaming, and I am twisting away, reaching
for the phone, my mother screaming, screaming
a shooter at their school
***
After 37 years of teaching high school English, Cecil Morris has turned his attention to writing poetry and has poems appearing in 2River View, Ekphrastic Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Poem.
