UNDER THE RAIN POEMS BY REBECCA MORRISON Š Rebecca Morrison
Some of these poems were published previously in: The UC Davis Arboretum Review, Late Peaches: A Sacramento Anthology, The Third Sunday Anthology, Cache Creek Anthology, Rattlesnake Review, From the Mouths of Angels, Jewel of the Valley and eskimopie.net. Cover painting of the author by Alejandro Escalante.
***
BARNCOTT PRESS
The Angel Spider 5 Lilacs 6 Desire 7 Beauty 8 The Olympic Girl 9 The Women of Putah Creek 11 His My 13 Bird Song 17
The All Night Drive Through the Stars to the Moon 18 Upon Eating a Manzanita Berry 21 Two Days 22 The Cabin Bed 25 The Water People 26 Out of the Blue 28 The Ocean and the Woods 30 The Kite 31 A Curve of Green 32 Baker Beach 32 Opening Robinson Jeffers 33 Vacaciones in Monterey 34 Window Panes 35 Untitled 36 From the Sun to the Moon 37 The Sink Hole 37 Quercus Ilex 38 The Pinwheel Heart 42 Written While Blind 43 Why I Come to the Creek 44 The Perfect Dance 47 Oek 'hua 'hua 48 The Sky Is Full of Holes 48 Incandescent 49 Snake of Stars 52
Mount Diablo 54 The White Osprey 56 The Most Beautiful Woman in the World 58 Rapture 61 The Eagle 63 San Joaquin Summer 63 Portent/The Flood 65 Rivers of Ice 66 Into the Blue 66 Poem for the Future 67 Serengeti Dreaming 68 Sea of Bones 69 Why I Could Never Be a Saint 71 A Flower Under the Alps 72 The Devil Mountains 75 The Three Cormorants of Time 76 Between (Summer and Fall) 77 The Dark Angel 78 The Keep 79 Memory 79 The Trunk of the World 81 The Map of the World 82 The Red Sail 83 About the Author 13
The Angel Spider A small black spider body like an unopened flower sees the wrought iron gate without realizing she can crawl between the bars without realizing that smallness of being is an angel spinning her own wings casting her spells into the May wind her tiny feet whispering across bricks hiding in cracks drinking angels’ tears To the spider the sun is overwhelming seeing nothing but light she needs the shadows the dark leaves of the mulberry tree one day is her heaven one sparkling web her dance around the Maypole spinning out from the center sun and shadow breaking dew on web into rainbow streamers as she turns her careful patterns ever outward ever subject to the wind a fragile net
waiting for a butterfly to eat The spider is hard and shiny and black she drinks poison not nectar she fishes in the dark corners she hides her hourglass on her red blood belly and dreams of flying
Lilacs increase and decrease and the sun in me is the moon in you and our growing is awkward like the hands of the clock running backwards with no vision in sight except for the lilacs and he told me he was having a crisis of faith in poetry that no one was listening not even the poets poets were just speaking and the voices are like flowers a field of poppies where Dorothy falls asleep in the somnambulistic cradle of the sun and this morning I ask another man why the poverty of the soul in America as if we always have to pick the flowers and enclose them in glass paperweights instead of just letting them be and he said poets have the soul of the nation
in their mouths that creativity is spirituality and god is my poem is in your flowers, your hair, your lips, your pain and "April is the cruelest month" and the lilacs' bloom is the kiss of death and spring is a sweet heavy melody that I just have to let go let rush over me pull my earth through my sun and I tell you this is your cross to bear this lilac, this mortal flower and spring is your witness and words are your rain and my eyes are why you should keep the faith because only by letting go can we hang on and the lilacs are breeding in the dark soil of our awkward glances and I will meet you somewhere between the cradle and the last gleaming and I want to make you believe at 2:00 in the morning in the Denny's parking lot that writing about lilacs and pain will make the spring a little softer
Desire When I first opened my eyes I saw that all was good and I wanted everything.
When the sun stood directly overhead I was dazzled and overwhelmed and everything was bright and clear and true and I wanted it all. But the afternoon cast shadows on bright flowers and I longed to rest in darkness. I slept on a smooth white bed covered with thin black sheets. The moon laughed in its ancient wisdom as it rose and fell and I wanted it more than anything.
Beauty “Stay on the path" —words of wisdom from the gardener If I had known there would be fine wine and roses perhaps I would not have come I am no longer quiet enough My hands are dirty But these are subtle differences, things that shouldn't matter to Beauty If I had known there was a garden I would have been afraid If I had known there was Beauty, soft light, silence, bird sounds,
I would have stayed at home Iron gates, perfect lawns yellow sassafrass— is this really Beauty? The birds who tell weeping stories? The bricks which sweep back and forth across the lawn? This vein along my arm, the blood— black, blue? I am azure I am red I am not quiet not pure not Beauty Wanting water, finding instead the desert. The perfect garden is no longer any kind of idea of mine. (Written in the gardens of Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, CA)
The Olympic Girl She of the superior ovaries lost one gold medal because she had taken ephedra, lost the gold world
for the sake of a flower. Just like Eurydice lost the flowers of paradise, the parasite taking her future by looking back, telling her the flowers were not made for humans, not for women. But we know differently. And we never question why we love the dark blue bells of the salvia calling us at dusk. Their sweet silence begging us to look back, to take them with, like the nutlet puts on its summer dress for the squirrel who doesn’t question his need, or the Indians who chose the ubiquitous redbud for its bi-colored bark but not the buckwheat whose scarce panicle now opens only on the wide Pacific.
The redbud in every nursery— Someone choosing one— perhaps the Mormons adopting ephedra for its allure, the cowboys growing hemp ropes, the whores dropping belladonna in their eyes, nightshade in his tea. Their superior ovaries like flowers inside flooding them with hormonic colors— I want red blue pale Datura sacred flower obtuse or acute but always desired.
The Women of Putah Creek To break into the night
with a handful of women, pushing down the fence, dredging up the past, as Putah Creek flooded our eyes with her story alive. We saw the creek split past the family of her body, the town of her eyes, filled with living ghosts as a bat circled by. At twilight we could almost see the funeral pyre, mother and child just beneath this empty reservoir. Patwin bones lining the labyrinth of the past, this maze of time flowing like the creek across the valley as night settled like the Spanish ranchers (I like this place, I think I’ll stay) on the oak-studded land. We poets, like Chinese laborers,
dig with our shovels in the sand, unsettling ghosts to make new paths for the flow of humanity which rushes by incessantly like a freeway into the night.
About the Author Rebecca Morrison is the editor of eskimopie.net, a forum for poets, artists and writers since 2002. She has published several chapbooks and performs her work frequently on radio and T.V. She hosts two reading series: Poetry in the Arboretum at the University of California, Davis, and Hot Poetry in the Park’ in Sacramento. She is a graduate of UC Davis and co-founded the Third Sunday Writing Group which has been meeting monthly since 1995. She serves as a Board Member of the Sacramento Poetry Center and is one of the founding editors of Poetry Now. She has published in a wide variety of journals including Flatlander, Tule Review, Because People Matter and Poems For All. She is a docent and gardener for the UC Davis Arboretum. She has lived in Alaska, Arizona, California, Vermont, and Switzerland. * The full version of Under The Rain is now available as a Kindle Edition ebook published by Barncott Press. A print edition will be published later this summer. BARNCOTT PRESS