Rusty Morrison

from AFTER URGENCY*

My mother died last autumn, my father in April the previous year.
"My dead," I've begun to call them, though words leave me

only more solitary in my dormitory of day-walking as I watch
the shadow-riding fog drown the valley. I hear the wren's call

traveling down its instinct-ridge, which is quickly too narrow
for my ear to follow, though I'm seeing the grass shift, as if

with an aroused sentience. A little anarchy as an ant, sudden along
my forearm, opens a fault line between its existence and mine.

To move a figure of thought out beyond my own senses,
then back in again, is to observe only my own pulse. Yet

I can use this activity as a measure of agility, if not
the accuracy, with which I observe the living and the dead.

***

Looking out the BART train window, I see a train
passing in the opposite direction, with its wide windows

clean enough and its cars empty enough to suggest that I
see through the other train's far window something more

than the landscape that returns to normal once
the other train has passed – something similar

to what arises behind my competing ideas about death
as I watch them pass at cross-purposes within me.

***

In a folder, my father's social security card – edges so
frayed as to fan white. It is spectacle, then crawlspace,

as I follow him into this object, which he has infiltrated
then vacated, but that I can't so easily escape.

I'm reminded of a print on my kitchen wall, hanging
below my cupboards and above the sink, an old

New Yorker cover that I had framed, which depicts
a similar kitchen wall to my own, and hanging on that wall

is a print below a cupboard and above a sink, and in that print
the kitchen repeats, evoking an infinity in which I stand

in each kitchen just outside each frame, a sensation of being
so clearly in none of those realities that I'm eased from this one.

*From After Urgency, published by Tupelo Press, copyright 2012 Rusty Morrison. Used with permission.

*The above sections are from After Urgency, published by Tupelo Press, copyright 2012 Rusty Morrisson. Used with permission.

Rusty Morrison's After Urgency won the 2010 Tupelo Dorset Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield. Her book the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta 2008) won the 2008 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ahsahta Press 2007 S awtooth Poetry Prize, the 2007 Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, selected by Susan Howe, and the 2009 Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Her first poetry collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing 2004), selected by Forrest Gander. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing.