Cecil Morris

Seeing Aging My Father's Bruises

Cecil Morris

Purple-black bruises float on my father's skin like boats moored on the tiny, nameless atolls of scabs he doesn't remember from the war he won't talk about. His bruises look like a blood splatter Rorschach from crime TV—as if he were there in the spray of murder and had not bothered to shower evidence away, had kept these badges of work completed until their red had dried the brown-black of old car grease. My father's bruises stop me like a traffic cop issuing citations and orders to appear. They scare me when I see them and haunt me when I leave, my imagination filled with accidents and spills, his mottled body broken on the linoleum in the kitchen or outside fallen under the mandarin tree, the ladder kicked over as he stretched to reach the highest fruit, the orange globes I couldn't reach and would have let spoil. The Big Bang has become a whimper and the whole universe shrinks around him, around us, diminishing possibilities pulling us together, compression of hard knocks and limitations that will lead us to a single place, the singular collapse of the one star I have orbited.

Cecil Morris, retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, now tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He likes ice cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little for his own good. He has had a handful of poems published in 2River View, Cobalt Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Evening Street Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines. He lives in Roseville, California.