Matt Morton

Improvisation in an Alpine Field

After months of snow-mantled mountains, spring.

This evening the meadow—the hard ground

which, last week, you would have sworn would never

again give way to flowers—is blotched pink

with hundreds of Indian paintbrushes, which resemble

neither blood, nor confetti, nor fire, though you often

hear them described this way.

This way. What do we mean

when we say that? A heretofore hidden road, perhaps,

a game-trail of mud and hoof-pressed grass through

a stretch of nettles and briers to an open field

where the flowers have bloomed again, simply,

like flowers, to be picked apart by the mule deer feeding

at dusk. If you could be any animal 

the question begins,

and as with most questions, the answer—

perhaps a stallion, an owl—matters significantly

less than the person you have asked, he or she being

the climate, you might say, which the question inhabits,

just as you might say the field gives context

to the paintbrushes, which ask, or seem to ask,

something now of us, we who have hiked here to marvel

at the bare, reared heads.

As if the earth existed

for this sole function of sacrifice, to offer us

whatever shape or color we desired. As if desire,

like the blazing flowers and the mindless silhouettes

of deer, were itself perennial, and we—after years

of starting out, of setting forth, and finally having arrived

at this particular unspectacular stretch of land—

might now be granted some measure of clemency

and could lie still, never again to anticipate watching

the people we love disappear.

Landscape

How like a forest fire is the heart.

I find it difficult, exceedingly. And who

somehow in sixty whirling years will be—

to coldly comfort one another—left?

I am bereft and are you heaven-sent

hope all the shes and hes in Valparaiso

and Marrakesh and snowy Turin.

Once I was pleased in a meadow to meet

myself, and carefully I ever after

have been like a hunter tracking him

through vales of greensward shadow

and timberline passes of rock,

pausing nightly to greet with great politeness

yonder moon. I have, in the highlands, mined

that it is good to begin slate-blank each day

anew—to leaping wake with a start and count

one’s seven crooked blessings.

The very least of which not being

how I, in history’s neighborhood, am here

for now, glowing. Thus it commences,

lightly, to rain. Like him before me

I tip my hat to you.

Improvisation Containing Trace Elements

Dust-speckled, the morning

light perforated by vinyl blinds—today

I will refrain from mentioning black holes

although they must exist because

science says, because each of us

freezes just on the edge of vanishing.

In the middle of the journey of our life I found

my love in a moonlit wood then woke

alone to an absence of arrows lodged in my chest.

A minor disappointment. Yet it lingers,

useless as the blue rubber-band which, circling

a wrist, recalls some pressing engagement

long since passed. The guidebook suggests

a hike around the volcano’s obsidian rim.

The spoon-swirled cream assumes a Rorschach form.

All the while on the cavern wall

dance the fire-thrown shadows of what we do

not want to know. Dear reader, don’t tell me

you’ve never dreamt of marching beside a stranger

across a sagebrush prairie, toward the distant

frontier. Maybe you spent without knowing it

your morning searching for arrows, struggling

to glean what? from the negative space. My advice:

if you find yourself off-route in an icy couloir,

consider the implications before

you proceed. How a wolf will patrol the fence-line

of its enclosure, plotting escape entirely unlike

ourselves, we who are not animal.

Maurice Manning