Robert Morgan

The sound of water in the air cools even summer sunlight, as though the upland pasture remembers oceans at this height when even dirt and rocks were young (warm-blooded life had just begun). The breeze plays leaves in sweetest treble and never tires of its long fable, in counterpoint to human foible. … More »

What looks at first like rotten fruit, hung round the maple’s slender trunk, we know’s a tortured cluster of malignancies where cells grow drunk with larvae, mites or fungus, worms, with virus or bacteria, and multiply as tumors, bulge of goiters, awful excess growths. But when you look at all the gross disfigurements at closer range you see the beauty of distortion, the sculpture of disease, the strange and replicating work the tree is not supposed to…… More »

There is a shade of purple in this flower near summer’s end that makes you proud to be alive in such a world, and thrilled to know the gift of sight. It seems a color sent from memory or dream. In fields, along old trails, at pasture edge, the ironweed bares its vivid tint, profoundest violet, a note from farthest star and deepest time, the glow of sacred royalty and timbre of eternity right here beside a dried-up stream. … More »

As wind stirs through an opening in woods, green feathers long as plumes on peacocks write in pools of sunlight from the canopy. And what they scribble must be dank as earth with ink of roots and alphabet of worms and rot of last year’s leaves and fallen bugs. The syllables they seem to scratch now rise, yes, levitate, a spinning hologram of vapor glittering in the shaft of light: a visitation of illuminated gnats above the shadowy glade’s scriptorium. … More »

The woolly bears go cross the road, their backs of orange and black a sign of winter’s length and strength to come. They inch across the lanes in fur fit for a monarch, fox, or star, as crows descend and yellow leaves fly out against the twilight breeze. However accurate the widths of colors on their prophet backs, or knowledge of their fate as moths, they seem intent on crossing this hard Styx or Jordan to the ditch, oblivious to the tires’…… More »

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