NEW! 3 poems by Rusty Morrison

Rusty Morrison

AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS


What sway in the noncommittal elm.

Gathered into my empty basket a wicker sky.

A crow, scissoring its call, clips the downward fall from my fiction of completion.

Do our senses imbricate to offer us a wing of ascent?

Succor of leaf-sound in the branches, each movement remaking shelter.

I see a progressive acceleration in the colors of sunset tonight, until it is stillness that disappears.

How to feel when roots break through the underside of my idea of them?

I pitch my listening to the tone of ivy growing.

Each leaf merely repeats, will not remain with me in the present.



AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS


Dour in the millpond, the material hours, built up on force alone.

The moth pushes and the sky falls down around it.

In the soft of redwood’s bark are deep furrows narrow enough for a serpent in sunlight to suggest itself.

Thicket of weeds and dwarf oak did not admit me into its filament though from a distance I saw how it incandesced.

Needing only one hand for balance on the dry marsh’s steep bed, my other hand couldn’t help but tear idly at the last growth of delicately tufted sedge.

Make a paste of ash, then paint out to the edges. Of what prophesy? When bindweed will spray silver-backed into blossom.

Lay down the idea of cathedral upon the redwood grove, as if this were accomplishment.

Sexed it with the crackle of leaves fallen.

So do I think to widen my imaginary surplus.



AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS


To value withering, I call it condensed light.

In the keep of mists is condensed distance.

Figuration is only the flower-head of a less visible frequency.

Where have I left its leaves this time?

When I’m steeped in flower stalk, uterine wall, tree-lined glade, humming is a way to avoid looking up or down.

Concocted my meadow foxtail.

Too quickly I pinnate each floating with the hyperbole of flight.

I could create slur, but neither birth nor cessation, in the stalks of late summer’s grasses.

Sunlight so easily abolishes philosophy.