Hiking

Hiking - a reading (on YouTube)

Heavy-heeled and authoritative,

Our boot gait claims the land,

A Chinese farm of root-filled

Stairs terraced down the trail.

Blazes like painted breadcrumbs

Lead out from gravel parking lots,

Where primitive bathrooms

Smell like other people’s piss.

We climb beside tumbling waters,

Up six hundred prison labor steps,

Our progress held captive to

Our hearts and conditioning.

Like breathless children

Chasing Christmas lights,

Around each corner we

Find another present.

A fluttering swarm of ladybugs

In color-coordinated jackets

Mirror the fall foliage in

Polka-dotted yellow-orange-red.

Purple blossoms cling to roadside

Shoulders like a nude model’s drape,

The velvet warmth of summer before

Winter’s brushstrokes lay her bare.

Construction-vested bees and bumbles

Vie with beer bottle green flies

As they binge on the ambrosia

Of autumn’s last call nectar.

A centipede undulates across

Waves of garden-bordered scree,

Dodging the blind rush of tourists

Chasing pamphlet-cover vistas.

Concentric rings of raindrops

Conceal a school of rainbow tails

Scalloping in the shadows of

A sandy-bottomed pool.

Nestled in holiday-scented needle beds

At the end of the last secluded trail,

Leafy lichened guardians eye the forest

With deer tracks and other arcane symbols.

We cherish each new memory

Like a dog-eared photograph.

Unlacing our boots with a sigh,

We allow our feet to breathe.

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

Water Falls

Water Falls - a reading (on YouTube)

The journey begins in stillness.

Leaves swirl in mirror clear water,

Suspended in slow-motion time.

Their descent begins as they trundle over the top.

They follow the path borne out before them,

Carving out grooves and paint pots,

Conforming to runnels and deeper channels,

Eagerly gushing from the witch’s cauldron.

Stair-stepped water courses

Over a tumbledown mountain.

Whitewater noise pours

From terraced tabletops.

Its conversation clings to

The principles of physics,

The tighter together,

The faster it flows.

Meditative pools feed

Slowly gurgling discourses,

Drifting from babbling isolation

To an animated roar deep within.

The downward flow

Cannot be halted,

Divisions emerge,

Faults and fractures.

Rivulets separate,

Sluicing down the rock face,

Foaming at every obstruction,

Reconciling only at the base.

After a brief midlife respite where

Back eddies trap the leaf boat coracles,

The current recaptures them,

Forcing them toward their eternal fate.

Water finds a way, an easier path than ours,

Generations erode one flaw to etch another,

Wearing away the rock like a worry stone

With the relentless repetition of their lives.

The current rushes by unchanged until,

Like all our tumultuous stories,

All too soon its journey’s done.

A chill relief hangs in the air.

And like distant echoes of

Murmured conversations,

Only as you emerge do

You begin to understand.


© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

Fall Colors

Fall Colors - a reading (on YouTube)

Fall colors the landscape,

Burning down the valleys,

Burning up the hillsides,

An ancient masque macabre.

Chartreuse oozes into yellow-green,

Amber drips like molten gold,

Crimson bleeds to garnet,

Carnelian fans each flame.

Coral filters through the maples,

A sunset glow at noon,

A maiden’s red-faced dance before

Winter strips her brown limbs bare.

A gray wind whispers winter’s secret

Which the hollow clatter of

Her drifting leaves can’t keep.

Samaras flurry like first snow.

Oaks with bark like an old man’s forehead,

Deeply lined and grooved,

Concentrate on their Taoist painting

In water, wood and stone.

The forest’s ancient children

Dab their slender ankles

In the sweet scent of decay,

Their mother’s rich perfume.

Her fiery dance continues

Until his springtime bride shifts

The palette to livelier shades of

Supplely glowing green.

Her color falls

Like winter’s snow

Until darkness and decay

Hold sidereal dominion.

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

Caverns

Caverns - a reading (on YouTube)

Sealed behind steel doors and

Rusty gates with cast-iron locks,

An ancient landscape leeches from the surface

Like some madman’s forgotten dream.

While the ranger regales us with tales

Of the Civilian Conservation Corps,

Shadows conceal the sentinels

Of deeper chthonic creatures.

We wend our way through goblin crawls,

Peering up suspiring chimneys,

Squeezing past primeval breeding dens,

On a path chiseled smooth by many hobnailed feet.

Galleries give way to sacred chambers,

Columns flank a flowstone cathedral,

Moated by descending rimpools,

The blackest mirrors of our souls.

Ribbons of water,

Ribbons of rock,

Ribbons of raw pigment,

Trickle down its twilight walls,

Painted ashen in calcite white,

Burnt iron umber,

Sooty black manganese,

Portents of the dragon’s ire.

Hoarfrost quartz encrusts his vaulted ceiling,

Precious diamonds ripe for tiny fingers,

While pilfering, wingless fairies

Lurk behind each dripstone drapery.

With pickaxes and sharpened shovels,

These mole-eyed miners ambush

His moonless darkness

With two-candlepower lamps.

We are reborn to renewed possibilities

After defeating the black beast within.

Dazzled by the dappled sunlight,

We stumble on beneath a verdant sky.

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

Laughter

Laughter - a reading (on YouTube)

Growing up, I remember laughter.

Laughter when my heart was broken.

Laughter at my pain.

Laughter that still whispers

You will always be alone.

I remember the summer accident,

Teenaged boys racing ten-speeds,

Our competition crashing to an end

When my pedal found his spokes.

I awoke to tears, his not mine.

We lamented separate injuries,

His bike lay bent and twisted,

My body bruised and sore.

Tentative movement revealed

No wound beyond repair of time,

A gash, a sprain,

A road rash eruption.

I lay back upon the easement,

Cradled in evening grass,

A drunken daydreamer poised

To study passing clouds or stars.

His mother’s concern soon eclipsed my sky,

First touching her unscathed son then me,

Scolding him for crying over a bike

When his friend might not be whole.

She retreated to call my mother,

Returning slowly, mechanically,

Pale and glazed as if she, too,

Had collided with a wire cyclone.

“She laughed …” she said

In a confused Swedish accent.

“I told her you were hurt,

… And she laughed.”

Her eyes pled with me for clarity,

As if I had any to provide,

Was this some American idiom

She couldn’t understand?

My mind offered only lead and ashes.

That page of my family lexicon,

While boldly written,

Remained beyond translation.

So I levered up my battered psyche,

And limped home,

Fresh wounds stiffening

To a shameful ache inside.

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III