The sparks that jump in hollow sockets
trace back to
the origin, the heart, the mother-matter,
which by day I spin into sense and substance.

I coax the shape, assign angles
their particular meanings. I designate
a certain curve the spine and allow
a shadow to answer for an eye.

Monstrous, the imperfectly real
is a thing of my hands, but is not my own.

My tools, warm stone,
morning brightness on my dusty knuckles,
the idea has settled in
to the atoms and loosened
the bonds that imprisoned form.

Sarah Morehouse
July 6, 2010

White paint was on your nose, your hands, your overalls;
your toes gripped the ramshackle ladder.
You lived in the shadow of Great Gramma’s pines, her leaning birches.
You had hung chimes from them made of rusted parts and broken china.
The walls of her cottage were propped up by stacks of your books.

In the watered down autumn sun,
which pooled on the plank floor without warming it,
I would have swallowed you down to infect me with your light.
Have faith that the butterflies are coming.
They will come, a swarm of color taking flight,
you said, mixing a rainbow on the water in your bowl.
Sea and sky and spacescapes, caves full of flowers bled out from your brush,
staining the walls of every place I slept.

You say nothing
because you lost your words in the accident.
You look at me the same way you look out the window.
Endless skybound swirls of polychrome wings flutter out from under your fingertips.

(c) Sarah Morehouse 2009

You will plant.
Between that and harvesting, you will water and weed.

The ink
poured out in such volumes is an act of blind faith
while the seeds are hidden,
and the sprouts always look alike, whether or not they will produce.

You will have to slash
and pull relentlessly; you will seem to dig up
more than you ever put in.

Water and weed, and wait, mostly wait,
although not idly.
Wait and hope. Pray
for or more like to the rain,
the warmth, the soil, the principle of growth.
Pray with your back and hands.

Shoulders bent and fingers cramping, you will find a new posture
imprinted on your body -
the shadow of your calling.

When done as acts of the pen,
they are not such dirty work (nor as viscerally satisfying,
for a farmer’s stomach may be full after a good crop.)

You may have tended, but do not count
the ones gobbled up
by mice and birds, fallen among the rocks
and burnt out at the root. Do not count
the hours, or the aches.
As a matter of discipline,
for your heart’s preservation, count only the harvest.

And at sunset you will straighten up and shed weariness for wonder
at the sight of something growing that had not been there last spring.

(c) Sarah Morehouse 2009

Cave people
abducted wolfpups, rescued orphans,
which, plied with food and warmth and taught their place,
offered trustful submission
as what is due the powerful.

But cats crept in unasked,
raised their kittens with firelight reflected in their eyes.

Cats listened
and watched. They calibrated
the cant of an ear, the flick of a whisker, the wink of an eye,
the pitch and frequency of a purr to soften the hearts
of those furless bipeds
whose leavings and varmints made for such feasting.

They tuned their mew precisely to a love song.

There are those who say,
and they are not few, that dependence and fidelity compounded
make a canine’s fealty
the paragon of friendship.

But let me argue that fickle, selfish love is purer.

Need will pursue its agenda, but he who has already got his supper,
who then lays his body out along your thighs
in liquid relaxation,
rumbling softly, his pleasure made contagious by sound,
offers himself complete,
demands nothing but the same.

(c) Sarah Morehouse 2009

So much juicy anticipation in planning the sensuous sweeps
of making his tail, the tight circles to fill in his eye.

I thought of squirrels with acorns, chasing each other round and round
the trunk of the big maple, teasing the dog
at the end of her tether, brazen upside down-hanging bandits
on the birdfeeder. I thought also of warm grass
and white clover and pretzel sticks and
strawberries and thundershowers and shoes and the red cup
for drinking apple juice.

I thought of my great grandmother’s stories about a game-legged red squirrel
who scratched on her kitchen window for crumbs. Her bent fingers
would make the scrabbling
of his tiny, clever rodent-hands. She brought her bright eyes
close to mine, beseeching with a flare of mischief, her nose wrinkled up,
sniffing side to side. Pancake, please?
I know you have made pancakes for breakfast, Mrs. Berry.

He struck my fancy. I set to work
pulling him from second-hand memory to the paper’s surface.

Red, the color of berries,
and Great Gramma Berry’s squirrel.

A hand crashed
down from behind me, smashed
my paper, snatched it up. The voice
that belonged to the hand, the stabbing eyes,
gave me cold rocks in the pit of my stomach.

In front of me, my squirrel was crushed in that fist.

Then I had new paper, a sharp finger jabbing it, and orders
to make a REAL squirrel. Such silliness
would not be put up with. Red squirrels and other such imaginary
things were for BABIES, were a kind of LIE.

To be clear, a general announcement was made that
squirrels were to have four legs, two ears, a bushy tail,
and to be colored LIGHT BLACK,
since there was no gray crayon.

Still, I say, if Great Gramma saw him, he was real, and if crayons
come in all these colors, why not
the whole world?

(c) Sarah Morehouse 2009

On the far bank an untended garden of brick and stone,
wild growth of tangled roads,
squat mansard roofs and flat-tops,
spires and steeples, Romanesque piles.

Farther back, hills loom up -
great green shaggy things,
villages tucked into shady crevices.

The zenith shines a blue so clear,
it’s a wonder the redtailed hawk has anything to bear him up.

Towering over softened peaks of ancient mountains,
firehouses and flea markets strewn along their valleys -
gleaming cumulo-nimbus columns -
five pillars in the east, hold up a darkening ceiling,
here and there a flicker, fast and faint.

Sun is on my back when the first drops land,
eeking that damp, acrid smell from the asphalt
that sets my nostrils tingling.

(c) Sarah Morehouse 2009