Loomings No Longer
Matt Morton | Poetry
I was all freshly aglimmer,
wave-persuaded into a gold possibility.
At first a marsh, a murkily-seeming surface.
But magnified our practiced roles
of shrinking turned up false. And strangely so—
how the beacon of dreams we imagined
could be so easily swept aside. Now
it was his shadow of terror who shrunk.
No, it was not the hoped-for endless
autumn stowed away, but a nevertheless
little gift, a balance beam. One half
level way to look, one half calmly steeling-oneself
in the wind. Leaves, burnt on
occasion, sharpened their edges.
The costumed sky became, merely, the sky.
I thought to my waking morning self,
Would that I might for year beyond year
discover myself just so! Because it is
after all a large fine planet, a giant sea.
I do not owe, but give thanks for
such bright and brief sufficiency.
Matt Morton has poetry appearing in Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. A finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, he is also the recipient of the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He serves as associate editor for 32 Poems and is a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas.
Featured Image by Karl Fredrickson