FREDERICK MORGAN

Meditations for autumn

1

It takes me aback at times, this slow disease for which I no longer have a name.

Old names are out of fashion and the new ones unconvincing: one suffers nonetheless.

What cure? In the search itself? In the striving? Don’t believe it, but give the beast his due.

2

From the being bbrn to the dying life is a butchery. The primitives got it right with their ritual compensations.

For those more enlightened, however, the unacceptable lurks just beyond the visible circle - knife at the ready.

3

People dressed in the styles of the 1880s and ’90s visit me sometimes after dark.

They gaze about my rooms in their graceful twos and threes uncertain how to proceed.

They don’t like what they see! I feel it, though they’re tactful and loath to give offence.

CQ )O/+-D

‘Be of good cheer,’ I tell them. ‘Soon I’ll be one of you, stuffless and serene - all beauties and contingencies having drifted safely down to the place of timeless patchwork.’

4

You bear the mark of what you are as children bear the marks of their abusers.

You do not know just what it is you’ve done, nor what was done to you.

Deep in your mind a scumbled mountain rises - so huge, you’d swear it reaches to the sky!

You sleep, and see in dreams the bridge on which you may not build.

Black water plays beneath. The span is brief, the far shore dimmed in mist.

5

Before the great resumption, a time of fitting anguish.

And the heart is stopped, almost, in paroxysm of loss outside the gates that may stay closed for good.

I think of the Chinese masters in their shacks beneath the moon: wine and chrysanthemums, the dignities of exile.

Reprinted from Poems: New and Selected by Frederick Morgan, University of Illinois Press, 1987, by permission of the author and publisher. Copy- right 0 Frederick Morgan 1987.