Four Poems by Mark McMorris
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor Robert Fernandez features four poems by Mark McMorris. About McMorris’s work, Fernandez writes: “These four stunning poems by Mark McMorris move between seemingly distinct territories, exploring the particular and the abstract, a ‘Practical Green Table’ and ‘A Place Made of Thought.’ They suggest that beginnings are unrecoverable, known only through artifacts and traces, and that a ‘real zero in orbit’ is at the center of existence, spurring and directing our searching and desires. One comes away from reading these poems with the imprint of the full, sensuous resonance of their music and the striking immediacy of their images: ‘the line between noise and music is inside you / like a moving shadow on the face of a clock.'”
Artifact of Beginnings
Paradise must be a landscape inside
the language we inherit from the logos
borrowing from each person’s childhood
to repeat the sounds of owls at night
the tactile image of mango trees evoked
by sunlight on a valley’s hillside
where you stand, the color of earth
and there is a green table cloth spread
before your eyes for games of skill
rectangle edged in white, and mown grass
an artifact of beginnings and a song
to stir the classes in a way not repeated.
What is it that is about the idea except
everyone agrees there must be such a place
the comfort of mass delusion or a wish
that it is ahead and not over, and not a fable
written by old men with feverish hands
never mind their skill at the cithara
or their bondage in the land of the Egyptians.
Say then that the idea of it pre-dates
the Ziggurat of Ur, or the Olmec Heads
at Tres Zapotes. If only we had a metaphor
“ostrich plume ginger” as old as the idea
being the inventor of the design and a place.
A Place Made of Thought
Say then that the world is thinkable
and that the thought in which it appears
studies a picture of itself, and that there is space
inside the mind like a honeycomb
partitioned by a geometric savant—
beginning of the primum mobile.
The mind stands upon the ground
like a house made of straw, infinitely
tranquil in space, inside the folds
thought thinks like a piece of cloth
unraveled at the integral horizon.
Beyond the limits, the downfalling light
races to construe a there, a species
of landing, altogether tactile and unstable.
Say that the place is in the ether
and that a scribe dozes, bent over his scholia
in his dream-state copying the copy of the
original chalice, the orchid in heaven
how far does the mind project, how solemn
the hypothetical trace of Paradise
not metaphor and mordant simulacrum
but a real zero in orbit, chief of the ideas
entrusted to the scholar, in his wandering.
Another Poem on Nudes
What more is there to say about the future
of sea-scapes and lilac, the power of machines
and the omnipresence of noise in the plazas
where once we heard nothing, except the falling
of water in a cistern, the round stone basin
calmly present during the transit of Venus
What more is there to say about tambourines
that mimic the bells on a leather saddle, strapped
to a horse you rode across the Chinese tundra
or rode over a dune into the sand sea below
the line between noise and music is inside you
like a moving shadow on the face of a clock
What more is there to say about metrical forms
the duration of syllables, what is the optimal spacing
between wind and fiddle, or scythe and deliver
what hiatus halts the ictus, what vowel tunes
the tympanum when a pianist conjures elegies
to his mistress, the line between nude and naked
always was mysterious, until I saw the bare bones
reclining on a divan next to the coffee maker
like a futurist in love with modern technology
like Goya’s Origin of the World or like Manet’s
Olympia with a black cat nearby, so frankly
sexual that the Venus of Urbino was offended.
Practical Green Table
I thought to write that elegy
as a reply to the questions
to pitch the word as far forward
like a dolphin out of the sea
over a threshold, to behold
the land as practical and green
as this table, a space to write
and walk into like a kitchen
hearing the conjunct vowels
what does a reader suppose
if not the promise of a text
the ultimate form at the end
of a chain of forms infinite
summed to a singular value
the elegy as a place to begin.
Once a week, the PEN Poetry Series publishes work by emerging and established writers from coast to coast. Subscribe to the PEN Poetry Series mailing list and have poems delivered to your e-mail as soon as they are published (no spam, no news, just poems).