Morri Creech

A Silent Figure in the Snow

The tangled syntax of the winter stars

compounds the young astronomer’s dismay.

And although Venus curls up next to Mars

(who loves her dearly but will never stay),

although cold weather will lie down with spring,

rising again to rinse the lavish air,

it is too late to find the fabled thing-

in-itself, the crux of matter, everywhere

crouching among the bare roots of perception.

It shivers, still, an ever-moving stasis,

an honesty dressed up as a deception.

White miles of sand surrounding an oasis

contract into a thesis and a theme;

evening dissolves to the mirage of dream.

                         *

Dissolving into the mirage of dream,

the molecules untether, wriggle free,

coil and wisp like a skeleton of steam

between the branches of the sweet gum tree.

A key turns restlessly inside its lock.

The breath of rumor pluming into fact,

the heaviness subtracted from the rock,

intention separated from the act

distill to what we know but cannot prove.

The stories that we tell are rarely true,

but some nights the gear’s tooth fits in the groove,

turning the wheel that renders all things new;

it grinds to dust the burden in the bone

by the sheer force of mind and mind alone.

                         *

By the sheer force of mind and mind alone,

one dust mote shines as if it were a world.

An angel wags her sword at the unknown,

fanning a wind in which the leaves are whirled.

The dance at midnight and the dirge at dawn

are pretty much the same, say all the books,

and random snowflakes blow across the lawn

as vain Narcissus worships his good looks

in the one pool that flatters his reflection,

an image of an image, nothing more.

Travelers stumble blind, without direction,                                                                                                                

the hangman tarries by the sycamore;

a fly, testing the web in which it’s caught,

twitches its wings, preoccupied with thought.

                         *

Twitching its wings, preoccupied with thought,

the fly itself, like Chuang Tzu’s butterfly,

vanishes in the dream its dreamer wrought,

the one in which mere being proves a lie

and waking seems another kind of sleep

until the sleeper dreams himself awake.

It’s true the woods are lovely, dark and deep,

but there are no more promises to break.

And, given the time and present circumstances,

the sorrows of the moon are nothing new;

witness to fifty million dull romances,

it throws off several layers in the blue

and leaves a space where it had been before,

shedding its petals, vacant at the core.

                         *

Under its petals, vacant at the core:

you tell yourself, someday that will be me.

Long after you have turned and closed the door,

feeling a fugitive’s anxiety,

you’ll vex the ecstasies of afternoon

or twist, a spider in the zodiac,

as Reverend Edwards said would happen soon

to those who squirm and snicker in the back

of the chapel. No turn is adequate

to what time’s constant turning turns us to,

nor is a gallows humor, nor dry wit,

sufficient balm for what the atoms do.

The body, they say, matters less and less.

And soul is just the body’s emptiness.

                         *

If soul is just the body’s emptiness

(a seraph in a cloud, a mind in thought),

let the wise chase a studied foolishness

down a corridor of questions, as they ought.

One part pure randomness, one part design,

events transpire beneath an ashen sky

in which the reckless elements align.

Let Peter say deny, deny, deny,

let matter lie with nothing in the dark

or make its vatic gestures in the dust.

Let lovers carve their names into the bark

in quiet woods at dawn because they must,

while black holes and the quasars that ignite

burn in the void or swallow up the light.

                         *

Burn in the void or swallow up the light.

Eat honey like John the Baptist in the wild,

in the shadow dividing day from night

where time and space are never reconciled.

Or hunker down and solve time’s calculus,

concluding that the end will end, as well,

just as I’ll disappear, anonymous,

into some mythic distance of farewell.

One day, a silent figure in the snow

amid the hoarfrost, utterly alone,

I will lie down with everything I know

to think the only thought of earth and stone,

leaving it to astronomers to parse

the tangled syntax of the winter stars.

Reasons in the Rain

The maple’s shadow cast its lengthening spell

like a verb at midnight reaching for its noun.

Both Jack and Jill stared down into the well

where innocent reflections go to drown.                                                

And Goldilocks lay in a stranger’s bed

when sun climbed irretrievably toward noon;

it shone on both the living and the dead,

but in the end it ran away with the moon.

And didn’t you give reasons in the rain

why no one dances when the music plays?

While fortune tellers took the northbound train

and fools recited poems in paraphrase,

we kissed at dusk under a weathervane—

that time of day, you said, when nothing stays.

                         *

At dusk (that time, you said, when nothing stays)

the stars were lighters in a concert hall.

In your late dream, the nights were more like days,

and summer flowers nodded in the Fall.

We sipped wine out of straws at Zippy Mart

an hour after we met in New Orleans.

Though spring was an engine we could never start,

middle-aged bikers revved their sleek machines.

And promise was a prank we pulled one dawn

when sun rose on the horizon in a rage.

You lay there, awkward as the lady sawn

in half by a magician on the stage.

Pale shadows crept across the empty lawn

the way a word gets set down on the page.

                         *

The way the words got set down on the page

was like a spill of wine, a spreading stain,

or like a midnight songbird in a cage

singing its ruined arias to the rain.

The poems of sun and moon were not yet over.

Still, we could see the satellites in space.

You lay me down and kissed me in the clover,

then bristled at the stubble on my face.

Tell me a place that haunts your memory,

you said. We were four thousand miles from Rome.

Light like a sword trick pierced the hawthorn tree,

glinting against my wristwatch in the gloam.

You knew exactly what to do with me.

You took my jacket off and took me home.

                         *

You took my jacket off and took me. Home,

you said, was no Nebraska in the snow;

it was Kubla Khan’s swanky pleasure dome

where you played Coltrane on the radio.

And Kasparov squared off against Deep Blue,

but even then we had grown far too bored

to make sense of the subtle moves he knew;

we committed only the faults we could afford.

And everything converged around your voice,

though you were only looking to unwind.

The valet fetched, by error, a Rolls Royce,

so we drove every back road we could find;

there at the dark crossroads of chance and choice

the rearview mirror shrank what lay behind.

                         *

The rearview mirror shrank what lay behind

the clear intent of everything we planned.

The songs I wrote, you said, were just your kind,

but the lyrics seemed too hard to understand.

Rain slowed to a drizzle all that Saturday.

The key turned in the lock once and was still.

Wayward preachers said we were shaped from clay

by a potter with real passion but no skill.

The baroque fires of invention gradually faded

into the dwindled smoke of less and less.

In hell, they say, the starved are never sated

(the reasons aren’t so hard for you to guess),

but feasts in Eden are still overrated.

Once they’re over, you’re left to clean the mess.

                         *

Once it was over, we were left with the mess,

which spread like murky whitecaps on the lake

among the beards of weed and watercress.

Young Ophelia drowned there by mistake,

and though you were never one for nunneries,

a pensive piety did make you look wise.

Some saints trade faith for other ecstasies

when God looks like the devil in disguise.

We sulked and raged. The hours grew more absurd.

Even at dawn it kept on feeling late.

We lay alone and rain was all we heard,

tapping its Morse against the paving slate.

The first to leave still gets the final word,

and the first word always seems second-rate.

                         *

If the first word always seems second-rate,

as the gurus say without much luck in love,

the chirp of a bird at twilight for its mate

must sound more like a magpie than a dove.

The romantics with their roses and guitars

watched old CSPAN reruns of Watergate;

cynics, musicians, cheats, and movie stars

joined to announce their latest candidate.

Fixed on the future, you were far away.

I read the cards to see what they would tell.

But you’d said everything you had to say,

and we had no more promises to sell.

Where we strayed into sunlight for a day,

the maple’s shadow cast its lengthening spell.

Wilderness of Meaning

At once the autumn jackdaws flew away

to bask in the humid greens of Carolina,

leaving an abject hush among the reeds;

wind made insinuations in the valley.

Knowledge ached that evening like a nerve

as though to set each red leaf trembling,

but I could see the high, cold northern stars

fastened above the alchemies of frost,

gleaming like grains of salt from ancient seas.

                         *                        

Maybe it is the holes in outer space

that make me fear the nothingness ahead.

The body, draped in cloudy veils of moonlight,

lies captive to the mirror’s backward look.

And though the narrow path is steep and slick,

leading to questions no one ought to ponder,

white lies cast palls of romance on the answers

as everybody knows, or else should know,

skulking in rooms of accident and error.

                         *                        

Those masks the actors wear on stage suggest

the scowl and grimace born of toiling on,

or else the dirge of mirth that ends with bare

ruined choirs, their sounds like the delights

of anxious idylls edging toward collapse.

Hiding subversive themes scrawled out in verse

under seat cushions, sheets, and tablecloths,

the Russian poet swallowed down his dread.

Then history blew a kiss, and he was dead.

                         *

The stars are gone and everything is shifting

now night breaks on the desert like a wave.

Travelers pitch their tents in bouts of wind

or ride their horses into the blown sand

while praying to the gods of rain and ruin.

The Tarot lady’s cards are upside down;

she shuffles them on horseback after dark,

interjecting the whims of intuition.

But there are no more fortunes left to tell.

                          *

A lone white blackbird fixed its ragged wings.

Hunkered above a clot of knotted branches,

it made fresh havoc in the mind of Sartre,

philosopher condemned, though free, to clank

his chains in crisp ontologies of snow.

While Saussure parsed the winter’s grave syntax,

a dazed and disaffected Derrida

lost his way in a wilderness of meaning

where clouds critiqued the color of the sky.

                         *

This evening I could see the planets past

the evanescence of the eastern clouds—

the music of the spheres, they used to say,

spinning old raucous records in the heavens

where angels do their strip tease on a pin

and mists eclipse the pallor of the sun.

When headless Orpheus lay by the river

senators wept and duchesses despaired.

Young Aphrodite broke her gilded mirror.

                         *

The clocks of Clio keep our history.

Civilized crimes of theft and genocide,

treason and broken treaties, still go on.

Stories of jackboot, bomb, and razor wire

keep pricking us with thrills of misery

until the midnight bailiff shakes her keys.

These days are all end days, my honey dove.

The autumn soldiers dawdle in the square

as though there were still time, and time to spare.

                         *

The sound of a barred owl knit night together.

No fallen leaf could lay November bare,

but doves and olive trees among the grapes

seduced both scribe and vintner, each of whom

savored the fate of footsteps on the stair.

Above the slate roofs and the balconies

the bells rang with a bronze bewilderment

as thunder’s soot-gray head was bending down.

And we could read the sentence of the wind.

                         *

The hours are tattered. Time itself is old.

But what they never tell you is that slight

silvery glints in lightless air can spark

the tailor’s brilliant thimble in the cold.

So now that your dream of clarity unravels

kneel down, o pilgrim, by the moon’s reflection

or wade into a river of confusion,

far from where the firethorn hides the lark—

where meaning brims, but nothing bears its mark.