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[with 3 poems by Robert Morgan]
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Flight of the Mountains
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Steep shoals
pyramid in the west,
high groves and
sacred
burial ranges
piled like thunderheads,
flap one on the
other to
high haze,
ladder up to the
dam holding back sky.
The great wings
back
each other
up all the way
to the final gap.
Clear weather
files the nick
sharp as
a gunsight.
I mean to climb
up there,
over the hogbacks and
heavy buttresses,
knowing hollows
and marshes
of meander
separate the
rough topologies to
sit at the tip
of the breaking
looking over.
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Robert Morgan
from Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; Carolina Classics Editions; © 2024
originally published in Land Diving, Louisiana State University Press; © 1976
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And those walls rest / like successive stages of etymology / on foundations and / castellations of temple-brothels / over cellar libraries. +++++ Tell
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I’m six and we’re driving from our home in Memphis to visit Grandmother and Granddaddy in Hamlet, North Carolina. Pre I-40, two long days on blacktop. The car games I can play with my little brother have already gone flat: Cow Checkers, 10 points for a white horse, 100 points for a white mule. Now Mom is entertaining me with the Alphabet game. We have to spot items along the two-lane that start with each letter in sequence.
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Airplane, Barn, lady wearing a Coat . . . now I’m stuck on M. We’re still driving through the low rolling hills of western Tennessee, its antediluvian coastal plane, and Mom guides me to look out the front windshield. “How far do you think you can see?” I can’t even guess. “That’s a mile, Billy. You can see at least a Mile.”
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I am astonished. Up until that very moment a Mile was an abstract concept equivalent to a very, very, long way. Much too far to walk, impossible that it could actually be a tangible thing, and here I was seeing one! This was also around the time in my life when I realized that I could not NOT read the billboards and road signs. I could no longer unsee the words all around me that suddenly meant. Words were warping my consciousness. Words surrounded me, more real than the objects they represent.
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Stratigraphy, the study of layers, is the deep domicile of archaeologists and geologists. Etymology is the archaeology of words, their first seeds, their roots and stems; etymology is the geology of language. How have the million intersections of grunts and grammar, symbology and syntax come to map and define our thinking? How can a handful of inchoate squiggles clustered into three or four recognizable tropes bring us to tears or make us fighting mad? And why do we persist in arranging them and rearranging them in desperate hope of creating something truly new?
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Logos – In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I will keep reading my glossaries and dictionaries. Footers and pilings of words will rise to gables and mansards and shelter me. Layer upon layer I will walk the strata of explication and illumination and poetry. Look, there ahead, a bright light – it can’t be more than a Mile!
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Tell
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Coming on a hill many stories
above the grasslands
and wastes of far-reaching canals.
Rain and high wind have exposed
bits of pottery and brick
around the summit.
A wall corner shows. Digging,
fortresses filled with blowing
dirt raise battlements
built on the ruins of others
ancient to them.
And those walls rest
like successive stages of
etymology on the foundations and
castellations of temple-brothels
over cellar libraries.
Peeling off a few more centuries finds
a mausoleum unsealed and robbed
before the body melted.
Shoveling through silt, lamina
of urns, weapons, after
a few thousand years to arrive
beyond assembling and restoration
at virgin soil, without clue,
no origin. There at the center
of the first hill just
sandstorms leveling and filling
all depressions, building ramps
up and over walls, and below that
nothing but mud where once
some river anointing
the steppes turned back to the sea,
and dust saying anathema.
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Robert Morgan
from Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; Carolina Classics Editions; © 2024
originally published in Land Diving, Louisiana State University Press; © 1976
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. . . You are one gene / in the cells of the body of language. +++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ from Mockingbird
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The fourth book in Robert Morgan’s Collected Early Poems is Trunk & Thicket. It begins with him opening an ancient trunk in the dusty attic of his grandparents’ home, breaking the rustmolten lock to delve its layers of artifacts and treasures and paper in a drymelt. The long poem, 25 pages, goes on to climb the trunk of his family tree, fall more than once between the branches, and thrash through tangled thickets of every memory and relic and Uncle that have folded and switched him into his own personal landscape. The tale follows no clear trodden footpath but is a bushwhacking through the clutch of briars to find one and then another sacred landmark.
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And the words, the words! The language of mountains and one-room churches and generations stretching beyond sight in the blue mist of ridges sits down at a rough trestle table with galaxies and particles and the fierce tokamak of the overhead sun. Some of these words were already chafed and well-worn when they clambered from the barque on the Carolina coast; some bite our tongues with the sharp teeth of ions and new-minted fire. Especially in the final long poem, Mockingbird, Robert Morgan calls together a congregation of words that shout as language receives a powerful new baptism. Proverbs and parables. Exhortation and invitation.
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Exalted and utterly common. Words are the leafmould that almost conceal heartleaves of wild ginger in February. Words are the green plant that thrives unseen in this cold atmosphere, that will not discourage a closer look. Words are the purple stems parting and recumbent buds opening. Despair, if you will, that there is no light left in the world, but then nevertheless kneel and touch and discover, before Spring is even a rustling gestation in your belly, that the words of earth are making flowers.
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The Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, available HERE from Press 53, reprints in their entirety his first four published volumes: Zirconia Poems (1969); Red Owl (1972); Land Diving (1976); Trunk & Thicket (1978).
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Read additional selections from this new book at last week’s VERSE & IMAGE.
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Mockingbird
[excerpt – introduction]
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While the bee sleeps in the southern night
and weeds weigh under dowries of dew,
above the distant honky-tonk of falls in
the July dark, before the katydids, when
the only frost is lunar, a voice that
raises the hackles on mountains and chills
the barometric spine, that radios through
many channels in the crab orchard and from
maples above the road. What madrigalist
watering the night with polyphony?
You could see orchestras and oratorios
in the polyglot dark, not so much a
mocking of the many-voiced populations
as a gathering to unlikely congregation
of all song, an anthology including
rooster and cricket broadcast from an ounce
of hot flesh through its briar tongue and filling
the hollows and thickets and dry ditches of
the river valley, and soaking under eaves
to the inner ear’s accelerator,
circling quick into sleep and bombarding
the ledges of dream.
+++++++++++++ It is my time then;
I surface like a drowned man after three
days and lie trembling with attention to
the heart’s perpetual bass. The dark belongs
to me, the peak of alert night. Mama said,
Then is the time to think about God and
feel close to him. But I float in a
sentient medium that amplifies the
distant creek rubbing its rocks, and mist
muddying the weeds by the dusty road,
and I hear the big distance between stars
where two almost light in the oak by the
window. The ascending particle
contraltos. The river’s a great liquid
bird singing all day between boulders,
over logs and around bushy islands.
Empties through the gorge its burden without
lessening. All night sings under westering
stars, loudest in the dark before day.
++++++++++ And then –
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Robert Morgan
from Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; Carolina Classics Editions; © 2024
originally published in Trunk & Thicket, L’Epervier Press; © 1978
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
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