Cecil Morris

Everything’s So Hard to Hold

The morning exercise with heavy weights
and spinning wheels. The recitation
of names, all the names I can remember
and fear losing like balance when I rise
too fast from sitting too long: spouse, children,
the colleagues still alive, the three siblings
(all different kinds of gone), the girl whose heart
I broke, the last three dogs in order,
their different barks, their favored toys, uniform
in love of bacon, the portly lawyer,
the rumpled detective and his cigar
and one more question, the rivers we fished,
the rainbows, slick cold struggle in my hand,
like these names. Everything’s so hard to hold.
Like these names, the girl who comes to clean
the house, the man who takes me out to dinner,
that’s my only daughter, my only son.

One January Day in Senior English

We were reading Marlowe and Raleigh and my students,
a mob of bright 21st century teens on the verge,
the cusp, dismissed the sweet romance of the poems, called them
materialistic, shook their heads or, worse, just looked
away as I posed questions to lead them to enlightenment
or, at least, to sympathetic understanding,
to appreciation of artfulness and sentimental longing.
And I was thinking why don’t TV teachers ever face
forty near adults squeezed into cubes of stale air
to be followed by forty more (give or take) and then
another wave and another, rolling relentless in
and out, when a girl about halfway back in the swell
of disinterested students raised her hand
and asked me if I were married and how I wooed and won
my wife, how I got her to “live with me, and be my love,”
and heads were lifted, swiveled. A teacher distracted
is a thing of beauty—lesson forgotten, abandoned,
no chance of test or essay, no bread crumb trail they’d have
to re-construct to keep their grades. I hesitated
and another girl said tell us, we want to know,
and a boy asked if I embroidered her kirtle or made
a bed of roses. Laughter rose and fell and all
attended, their eyes alert, eager for a glimpse past poetry
to truth of teacher’s secret life of romance real.
And, buoyed by their attention, I let myself float
to that Tuesday evening when she won me, when she,
her hands swift and gentle, brushed a crumb from my beard
while she kept talking as if nothing happened,
as if she had not just proven she would care for me
even as roses wilted, posies began to stink,
and cookies crumbled. That second date, that dinner
I prepared, the seared filet of sole, the last light
of September in her hair, the rapids of her laugh—
I gave all that to them and, in doing so, I gave it
again to me. They still thought Marlowe silly
and Marvell a dirty dog, but, for a few minutes,
we were all completely alive together.

Some Reflections on Happily Ever After

Anniversary thirty-nine, and still in love, I guess.
It was more marinade than fuck, his hardness lodged in me,
motionless, or moving at a glacial pace, advancing
and then withdrawing in ages, epochs. I remember wondering
if some drugs were involved, some altered state. I remember
wondering at the nature of his desire that it could
be aroused, inflamed, then arrested and held,
a twelve-day candle, neither heat nor light consuming it.
Years and years, this steady presence, this extra bone,
another rib perhaps, this slight curve, this cuttlebone,
this slick mango pit, slippery, hidden,
almost, not quite, a part of me by now. I remember
thinking, silent, thank god he’s not on top of me,
not pressing inexorably down in slow crush
of death, some medieval torture to prove me witch.
My God, even the lighter weight of the nursing baby,
so long ago, so dear, so often the dream recurrent,
would have been too much after this long. If this is
some kind of zen state, some tantric sex exercise,
I thought, then no thanks. It felt like slow dance
to meandering Jerry Garcia solo, the old junior high stand
and sway, where I would feel my goose bumps rise
then subside. Where, for god’s sake, was the finger-picking
the note-bending, the vibrato. I compiled a to-do list
and went over and over it so I would not forget,
yet knew something would be lost. It was like
the worst insomnia, a bottle-neck, a logjam of minutes
piling up in the digital clock, and purple dark unrelenting
but unremarkable. This long gentle impalement,
this anchor holding me—he is still here, still here.
That unspeakable thrill drawn to long exhalation,
to daily dissertation, both a comfort constant
and a disappointment; at seventeen, at twenty,
at twenty-five I expected still some sudden
surprise from time to time, some gasp and giggle,
some brief but glorious escape from gravity’s hold.
Now it’s the favorite coat, the recliner worn just right,
the mashed potatoes and gravy still warm, maybe
a piece of cheesecake. Will heaven wind down to this?