ustxtxb_obs_2003_10_10_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

POETRY Quo Journal: Whatever Comes Often I’ll wake, stare up at the trees and the wires that carry voices. There is a voice in my head. It wants me to focus, pines for the erasure of wires and nostalgia, of crows and the way I love late afternoon light. There I go again. There are voices among the branches today that sound like speeches from a public square or another stony place. One side yells, the other yells. Their darkness is terrifying. One side yells, the other yells, my darkness. Speech in the trees is like my voice in my hands: whorls, faint lines, the habit of closing in on itself, shadow and illumination like clouds beneath a sun. Little black wings. My life is a recipe away. Often I’ll wake, stare up at the trees at whatever comes between the man and the sky. Quo Journal: Equinox No one is pleased with this darkness between neighbors, the way our hourglasses move from swollen to shut, the silence below the stairs and brother black coat hung in the dark. Under a sleep-blown moon and creaking starlight, whose voice might resurrect and make whole a pressing freefall of children and their shadows? My hollow ledger wants the flowerink of spring, a wink that will surely skunk all nay-sayers snowlit and spotted with blue and black woolens. June is a dream that speaks when not spoken to. Light. Scrapbooks ready-made and wish-fulfilled. Can you see them, the kids and their models? Their little balsawood ships called present tense. Their windows of smoke. Their sturdy frames of tin. Michael Morse Michael Morse lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches English at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Hispoems have appeared in Agni, Bomb, Colorado Review, Field, The Literary Review, Spinning Jenny, Tin House, and The Iowa Review. Naomi Shihab Nye 10110103 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 21