Poems by Cort Morgan

Outer Beach

Long before we saw we felt the thump of waves.

Over on the bay side, weary, wading our canoes along the sluicing creeks, switchgrass slices on our legs.

Then the portage over dunes, staggers, bare feet sliding, dragging chafed old crates, looped with stiffened rope

to a sun-tormented cabin, drowned in sand. Washed in with a storm, we thought; no one had built it there.

More wrack than cabin: crooked gaping windows, bleached, sand drifted rooms, a desiccated sea bird, splayed.

A rusty hand pump squealed and rattled, shook and swayed, reluctantly released a brackish gurgle in our hands.

Underbeat of waves continued as we stowed our gear. Rhythmic shudders, ruined house as drum.

Camp established in our heads at least we stumbled up that final dune to see the shining edge.

Dazzled, mesmerized, devout, we watched each racing arc approach and slow and rise from south to north,

curl, hold one translucent green eternity, topple, crash, and surge its seething foam.

Then at last, released, our headlong run, all together, down and down, shouting in the deafened wind to risk destruction, enter in, be born.

Late August in the Mountains

I can feel it now; the woods are tired. A hornet with a missing wing climbs slowly up the shed. Relentlessly, cicadas rasp away at peace.

Spring’s extravagance and summer’s surge are past, the oaks are eaten thin, a filigree.

Maple, dogwood, sassafras all drop their first red leaves, corroded, spiraling.

In the quiet of a windless night, acorns falling, banging down on Ray and Dolly’s metal roof a quarter mile away. The creek is thready and its pools are dusty, still.

Early sun is angled, low and yellow. Motes and beams among the trees stream slantwise through the humid air. Tang of fermentation. Summer’s cloak is wearing thin and no one here will mend it.

I can feel it now; I‘m tired. This morning at the spring, a raven, glossy, strong, was sipping at the pool. He raised his cocked head skyward, open beak, and eyed me sideways, only yielded when I spoke to him.

There was no hurry though, on his part or on mine. His eye flashed as he flapped up, confident, and I refilled my jugs. He gripped the branch and studied me, knew his season was approaching.

Hills of Hoy

Hoy, old Norse “high,” is one of the Orkney Islands. I knew these hills before I saw them, dreamt of them in distance, long ago. Miles away, across the Sound, hazy violet in a falling light, smoothly curved, maternal, they cast a shadow on my heart, moving inward as it vanishes, like water into sand.

At twilight on this northern strand, islanded by memories, I watch the hills of Hoy turn darker, clouded indigo. Soon, they will be blacker starless arcs against a glowing sky.

Yesterday I trod these hills; on paper they’re not high. I felt their tumbled, weathered stones, scratching heather, whine of midges and my knees’ complaint. I flushed some upland hares and watched the dance of mists.

Tomorrow I may walk these hills again, dislodge some gravels on their flanks, trace a curving ridge in rain, watch a peaty river far below, lose my way and find a new way back. I may. But how I see these hills tonight is how I love them best and will recall them: far away and dimly blue. Distance, time and silence form their hue.

Where Water Was

August afternoon, a little creek bed in the woods, shallow, dry, descending over ledges down the mountain flank,

smoothed by curving shoals of sand, empty on this unspecific summer day, waterless for now, but ferns along its edge are proof of hidden seeps.

Sandstone ledges, neatly horizontal, sugar textured, loose their grains at rates we can’t observe, those same sand grains, we hear, that made a beach two billion summers past.

How many changes wrought upon this quiet, nameless land: noon and midnight, fire and frost, drop by dripping drop and grain by grain of sand.