Rusty Morrison Biography

Eggs, transparent and sometimes red-veined as insect wings, might be hidden
in bark crevices

or a scatter of tawny leaves.
...

crowded Monday subway its mindlessness botanical
you take the first seat claim it for your age your figural
effaced your t-shirt smelling already like somebody
...

I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop
it was only from out of my thoughts that I could climb stop
not from the room please
...

(a myth of consequences)
The ivy across our back fence tangles gray
into a green evening light.

How a second emptiness
un-punctuates the first.

Disloyal,
we attempt to construct.

An ache will tighten
but not form.

Making impossible
even this upsurge of crows across our sightline.

The Mayans invented zero so as not to ignore even the gods
who wouldn't carry their burdens.

Too slippery as prayer, too effortless
as longing.

Our problem was preparation. Premeditation
neutered any rage potential.

Years later, the spine of our backyard
appears to have always been crooked.

White jasmine, dove-calm in the lattice, is not
a finely crafted lure.
...

In through our bedroom window, the full dawn-scape concusses.
Difficult to sustain sleep's equilibrium of wordlessness.
Naming anything, like stepping barefoot in wet sand up to my ankles.
Name after name, sinking me farther beneath waking's buoyancy.

House, this morning, is pale with the rush of what night siphoned off.
Objects, still emptied of resemblance, hum their chord-less cantos.
Bloodless, my knuckles knock on walls without echo, testing singularities.

Sun on the cutlery offers an ageless sheen.
Though it ages the silver relentlessly.

New, but still rudimentary tools to be gleaned from my over-used weaponry.
...