Artists are the ones for whom it is death not to be intimate with the gods.
The following poems are from Cruel Heart, a collection in which Chris Morgan probes our need for deeper connection—to ourselves, one another, and to the natural world. Cruel Heart is a meditation on intimacy and its absence, on the necessity of authentic Eros in our lives and the dangers rendered by its neglect. These pointed, intelligent poems about survival of the human heart in a modern landscape are alternately a barbaric yawp of celebration for being and a howl of grief for what we have wrought. Simultaneously, a lyrical current of hope animates this remarkable collection too—an unequivocal faith in the transformative power of nature and art, an insistence that compassion and beauty go on mending our deepest wounds.
returns the poems i’ve been waiting for have come home they return in their own time ripe and ready i can smell the rain and roots of trees blue ocean brine on their burnished skins how i love the smell of them coming home _____ just like that I offer up this incandescent breath and accept it’s true after all about those corollary boundaries of the heart and sky. my blue-green losses have made of me a sea bird with no space for freight in the paper-chambered bone, land a clay thought of fogged cliffs, red dust shaken like shroud. i live in the layers between, pared down in air for the journey over an ocean’s wide waste. this ache in the beaten wing signals a life balanced somewhere between the cruel sky and the cruel sea. _____ I lived in the time of the final desecration of the temples of earth. Which side in the agon was mine? What finger did I lift against rapacity of the monster race? Is the fact that I’m alive a testament to complicity, guilt? Was I ever once a voice crying in the wilderness of bone? One by one the emperor trees fell to the blades of the new gods. The sludged meadows glowed a moment before withdrawing into ash. Migrations blundered in petroleum seas. I lived in that time. I was a man of the Machine. My little silence blessed the slaughter of the elders of the world. _____ August I came for the red oleander on the forest road where once I saw a girl on a white bicycle with around her the sound of wind or the sea I could not be sure and when I looked again through that dappled light breaking over shoals of pine she was gone I could not be sure she was except the flower of her mouth like a red memory among the trees _____ Anarchy of Love He speaks from the precise mind precisely, his blue eyes cool with in their pebble-beds the bones of truth, fleshless, bleached, elegantly arranged. Meanwhile at my house the grass rages, green with war. Armed with nakedness love goes overturning the government of the mind, suffering outrage, plundering the countryside, spending its nights in the revelry of towns or occasionally secluded in a firelight of prayer. At dawn it calls the dead from their caves, all day touches broken things with a child’s mind, then hands itself over to be killed. _____ Post Script My death that is coming will not stop the documentaries of love. Over and over again one begins with the word, utterance such as tree. And the insurrection resumes. Births insist over thresholds of flesh. I have seen the dark earth turned like a grave and the yellow dog crazed in the wood. After silence grows over the stilled river of my mouth, my ears forsaken by the sound of light, the declaiming of the earth will go on. I was a single song. My death was a building. My death was making room. |
Dog-wise He emerges like Lazarus from stone caves of sleep. He squints through a suffering of light, shakes off the cloy of slumber. The puddle fur dimples down in wet circles of sprung bone and unseats more than sleep: torpor, punishment, guilt, despair. The scales fly like disease from the sickled snare of canis made new again, the first dog, companionless and pure. He draws new breath and blows with shining eyes the yellow trumpet of his heart, shatters the incarcerated world, waggles onto the fields of victory to love, to be loved, no more. _____ Since you’ve asked my religion is sunlight and dune grass (horsemint, sea oat) blue cruise of sharks in a smoky sea. For the record my religion is seabirds sailing the open coast combed black on blond. It tastes of oysters, makes oceans (of eyes, skin and) bones from clay. And poses no questions. Suffers no remorse. Accrues no guilt. Its supple figure reclines wind-shaped in the wisp of a woman’s body (buds to sky upturned). Listen carefully. Its psalms are sung in the throats of beasts, whispered in the seethe of tides, chanted in the lunar phases (of darkness and light) that migrate back and forth through the cruel heart. _____ Strawberries The heat and the rage of it and the dew on the world. You have to write like the dew is on the world. You have to forget everything that has come before. A voice wakes me to the first real heat of June, a violence so blunt the dog refuses to follow. Despair reclines in the window-chair and I’m slapped hard again by the strangeness of this world, its searing beauty and searing pain. Then remember the red strawberries, hear their dimpled calling from cool caves of dark. Guiltless with a hooked knife I ignore the labor of their long spring and sever their soft heads at the sink. I eat them as if I were dying. _____ heron lamp when i’m done make a chandelier from my sung bones to hang in a high pine above the bay with room enough on each bleached rung for a heron to burn bright and wild as my days were once on this lost earth |