In the Gathering Heat

. . . in this interval of cool air before the sun flashes its bald stare I lie down in the grass beneath the trees, and it’s so green in the shade, so quiet a stir of barely wind, just breath in the higher branches and a tanager finally here (if late, very late I thought it might not make it back this year) breaks into throaty song, and I exhale gratefully— delay the lover’s strategy and

the body’s as it rises on a slow crest to ecstasy may be part of the joy in hearing its song its only song I’m here— what used to be simple and also, yes lyrical is endangered now as is for example Argentina where scarlet tanagers go in winter to a checker board of pasture and ruin where once there was rain forest— Argentina, a verdant

place in a mind that would keep forest alive just by thinking about it— alive just by saying fern, orchid, bromeliad keeping them whole not broken into orchid bromeliad— yes, once there were forests within forests, forests in air where tanagers hung their nests and bred fed and reset their inner compasses flying north thousands of miles, and even now “with minimum warming twenty

percent or more of all species are headed for extinction by 2050 . . .” even now they manage to return, breaking into chic-burry, I’m here if barely— so tell me, of what use is the pastoral now? a merely human form that’s threatened if not extinct a form invented so that poets could sing, Here I am, me too! and woo women— and there’s no refrain, not now as I look around me and see that as green midsummer leaves

take in more light, they also darken— well, it’s only natural it’s only rural these patches of green yard that divide us and it’s so quiet really quiet now—Who is able to sing— the heat’s rising, it’s rising fast so that more apt than song is the cairn of stones in the browning grass whose silent epitaph may be and they didn’t see it coming

Robert Morgan

Because He’d Lived So Long a Bachelor

Because he’d lived so long a bachelor before marrying, before begetting us, my father always washed his own work clothes in tubs of suds out on the porch, and sewed the patches on his overalls and faded shirts himself, the needle dwarfed by his enormous work-swelled hands, the fingers bentbyage andweathering. My mother never was allowed to clean or mend the soiled and worn apparel. There was something paradoxical about his grasp, more used to axe and cross-cut saw, or hoe and shovel handle, drawing the all but invisible thread in and out of denim or khaki while sitting on the backporch steps to get the brightest sum, and resting from his daylong toil. Because he had remained a bachelor so long my father did not shave till after supper, or comb his hair, a habit from his courting days he liked to joke. With unexpected delicacy he creamed his cheeks and chin and upper lip andthen caressedthe foam offwith aflashingrazor, wipedthe froth from tenderskin. And only then, with hair both wet and groomed, would he sit down beside the stove to turn the pages of his Bible with such care and concentration that it seemed he read oblivious to all around and unconnected to his time and place, in a dispensation unfamiliar, because he’d lived so long a bachelor.