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  • Love Might Utter the Only Verse That Wouldn’t Insult the Dying, and: For Robert Strickler
  • Donald Morrill (bio)

Love Might Utter the Only Verse That Wouldn’t Insult the Dying

With each other, let’s be simple. Place a blossom on the tongue.

With each other, let’s be ample. Shut that history without a mark.

Let’s be humbled like all temples. Fire tugs the air around us.

With each other, let’s not gamble. Let’s hold back, this time, from Fairness. [End Page 145]

A tangled string of keys. And their locks? The ants ignore the stale trap, streaming toward some cryptic sweet.

Don’t sit with me. Don’t let me argue further. Leave me to the ink bottle and the morning mowing men, their necks studded with sweat-fed pimples, barking instructions over full-throttled motors.

Leave me to the stratagems of sinister confessors—self-improvement!

Get on through your best work and forget us until nightfall.

The gladioli droop. Out they go! And their murky, malodorous water!

No mourning our transience in theirs (Sorrow would be inescapable) Though they nonplussed us, Blazing in the farmers’ market bin.

Remember when doubting my love for you, For anything, proved to you Our passion was intelligent?

Your face withdrew into unbroachable darkness— As though down a well, or mythic cave— Yet remained Untroubled as we spoke.

We must take our nerve elsewhere.

That man on the beach flying the two-inch kite Pulled from a cigar tube: He’s our muse. [End Page 146]

And that tire tread along the sand Like the spine of an ancient fish: A fossil Until the next wave.

The hour can’t say how it becomes a day, a day a life, those gestures that are ours, not ours to observe only.

Love might countenance our gift, if we have one. We might hold its body in the night and thus the darkness. We might turn around at last and see that this is what the forgotten looks like, though we are not yet forgotten—ever taught, ever groping, crowd of ourselves in the gold wind.

The rose opens to our room tossed by loving. It forgives us jobs we’ve had to part for. What does it know about care before clippings? Beneath the slot, mail sprawls—silence without us. We’ve caressed the python at the children’s zoo. We’ve swum in rain, the old us. We keep our dalliance with perfect solutions. The rose craves tact, its radical priest Executed by partisans and resurrected by rhetoric. We overthrow its piety, overthrowing ourselves. Who can tell it? We dressed like mortals and drove away. [End Page 147]

For Robert Strickler

Brochure copy calls this island paradise, But they are paradise and rarely know it: These kids beneath that budding flame tree, Slapping dominoes on table tin Or slouching on the wall nearby, smoking, All facing west, beyond the coral heads Like dogs awaiting sight of some lost master.

Boredom: a bottle one flips over his back! The sequins on the rump pocket of her jeans— Torn, perfect. These need no poems of consolation.

Weren’t we once among them?—ready To ditch our beach and family, And the hot, scrub inland yards, barbed-wired, Clucking with chickens and the one cold beer Day work buys till death? Bang! The numbered bones Are whacked together and, again, scrambled— Thin waists, caking sand, secret dream, party . . . How they become us! gazing furtively At them across a work vacation lunch. Agh! There’s no sauntering up to ask these friends To explain us. There’s no talking to us now. [End Page 148]

Donald Morrill

Donald Morrill is the author of two poetry collections, most recently With Your Back to Half the Day, and four books of nonfiction, among them “Impetuous Sleeper,” forthcoming. Currently, he is interim dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Tampa.

“For working class families like mine, post-war prosperity provided greater access to education and the arts, and most of all an introduction to the idea that improving your lot was not only a material but cultural undertaking. Thus, some...

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