Three Poems, Rusty Morrison

 

NATHALIE SARRAUTE  #1

NATHALIE SARRAUTE TELLS US THAT SINCE CAMUS WAGERS ON THE SIDE OF IMPOSSIBILITY, HE NEVER CAN BE TAKEN OFF-GUARD. (from reading The Age of Suspicion: essays on the novel 1963)

A doe in our front yard is chewing the last bud from our rose bush. Its petals are the crystalline pink of Himalayan salt. With our bedroom window open, we can watch her brown eyes set and a pair of full moons rise in their sockets. I close my eyes, for what seems only a moment, but already it’s morning and my husband is gone. Did he leave for the office? I walk outside to see if his car is still in the driveway and find a crow on the phone-wire with shiny black feathers. Their shine is a mirror I’m caught in. If the crow soars into the clouds, will he carry me away with him? Yahoo News on my laptop reports that dice manufactured these days have dots that rub off on one’s hands. This seems to me the way it should be since luck should turn blank and thus open to interpretation. My mother had a blank expression in her eyes when she scowled and ranted at the TV news, at me, at her long-dead husband, my father, as if he were still stooped and silent beside her. In her last months, she lived in a care facility. She would turn toward the wall, facing away from me, when I’d sit beside her. We were, to each other, mirrors more dangerous than crow feathers. 

NATHALIE SARRAUTE  #2

NATHALIE SARRAUTE TELLS US THAT PROUST DEMONSTRATED WITH HIS CHARACTERS HOW WE WILL NEVER FIND DEPTH BY GOING DEEPER. THERE WILL ONLY BE MORE LAYERS OF SURFACE. (from reading The Age of Suspicion: essays on the novel 1963)

A few weeks ago, my husband Ken read the registered letter that came to us both. He said that excavators would be first, then carpenters would work deep in the earth to build a subterranean bistro that a group of wealthy investors had planned to open sixteen miles below our house. Along with the letter was a report from the county confirming the investors’ rights. The study they commissioned guaranteed there will be no impact on our property and that the bistro is beneath the limit of our property line.  “…and so, and so…,” chirrups a mockingbird in the tree outside the window. It’s mimicking Ken’s voice, as it often seems to, at dawn. So often I wake up angry. Ken isn’t here. If he were in bed beside me, he’d tell me there’s nothing to be done. He'd smile and say he found humor in the registered letter’s explanation that we’ll receive a dozen free gingerbread scones once a week, for the lifetime of the bistro, as a courtesy. I know the bird won’t answer but I ask it if Ken is still in the hospital, where I’ll drive again this morning in rush hour traffic, between cars with white motionless men driving them, as if chiseled from stone. Is that how I look? The bistro’s promotional flyer says they’ll feature three kinds of organic coffee, served at the precise temperature of urban strife in the morning and urban loneliness at night. Each cup will be accompanied by $20-a-pound Muscovado sugar, and cream from free-ranging cows—all of it described as deliciously and convincingly authentic, which is what convinces us that it’s not.

NATHALIE SARRAUTE  #3

NATHALIE SARRAUTE TELLS US THAT DOSTOEVSKY’s CHARACTERS ONLY ACT AS IF THEY’RE LIVING THEIR LIVES, BUT THEIR MOVEMENTS ARE ALWAYS ONLY ADJACENT TO THE REAL, THUS CALLING ALL OF LIFE’S SUBSTANCE INTO QUESTION. (from reading The Age of Suspicion: essays on the novel 1963)

I accidentally left a windsock hanging on our porch-rail during last night’s heavy rain. This morning it’s full of holes. When I reach my hand into it and try to push my finger out one of the holes, no finger appears. If I slipped all of me into one of the windsock’s dark holes, where might I find myself? I’m about to say this to my husband Ken, to make him laugh, but he’s choking again on too much phlegm to hear me, as he does most mornings before words can pass between us. There’s a hole, so dark, so deep in his throat, which seems to be calling him into it. If he goes there, will I be able to follow? Would we both be lost? I must remember that in the best fables there’s always an escape. It has taken all the years of my adulthood to gnaw deep into the wood, but finally I’ve splintered my childhood bedroom door, which my mother kept locked. Even as a girl locked in her room, I knew I could hike-up my skirt past my thighs and reach in between them, far enough to feel where there’s no end to my own heat rising in tidal rhythms stronger than any ocean’s. I must remember now that a dark place might have many reasons to call a person inside it.

Rusty Morrison is co-publisher of Omnidawn (www.omnidawn.com). Her poems have recently been accepted by American Poetry Review and by Fence.  Her five books include After Urgency (won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize) & the true keeps calm biding its story (won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, James Laughlin Award, N.California Book Award, & DiCastagnola Award) & Book of the Given from Noemi Press. Her recent Beyond the Chainlink was a finalist for the NCIB Award & NCB Award). She is a recipient of a Civitella Ranieri fellowship, and a recipient of other artist retreat fellowships. She’s one of eight fellows in the inaugural year (2020), awarded by UC Berkeley Art Research Center’s Poetry & the Senses Program. She teaches & she gives writing consultations. Her website: rustymorrison.com