#morton marcus

[the-end-of-art]

Heavy planet

The Stars by Morton Marcus

The stars are grains of salt thrown over God's shoulder. They fly from us and we fly after.

But the heart, that dark star, the heart, that heavy planet, is all we can know of heaven.

[endless-unfolding]

But the heart, that dark star, the heart, that heavy planet, is all we can know of heaven.

Morton Marcus, from “The Stars”

[whitepinepress-blog]

What is alive in us, what vibrates in our animal skins, is a harp string that is never still, a harp string tuned to the drone of silence. It is the single thread, the radiant filament, that sews u to our coat of darkness, the umbilical that holds us to the planet each of us is yet allows us to wander among the stars - the guy rope that secures us to ourselves, yet lets us venture into the darkness all the way to the planet of someone else.

The Dark Figure in the Doorway: Last Poems Morton Marcus

[whitepinepress-blog]

I wanted to be many things: athlete, teacher, millionaire. Now I am content to be a cricket in the endless plains of the Buddha's palm.

The Dark Figure in the Doorway: Last Poems Morton Marcus

[whitepinepress-blog]

It is like a cut-glass bowl on a moonlit night when we can no longer tell the sparkling container from the glittering water it contains. Do you see? There is nothing to get excited about. We are talking about an ordinary glass bowl. Just a bowl. And water, just water. And yet, an yet...

The Dark Figure in the Doorway: Last Poems Morton Marcus

[whitepinepress-blog]

All over the planet, fields of grass lift quivering tongues in the moonlight. They are a chorus singing of the bones buried beneath them, and of the whisperings of roots and seeds clinging to the sides of stones. The planet vibrates with their song. Such reverberations are our future, all that will be remembered of us among the gongs and cymbals of the galaxies and the dissonant choirs of cosmic dust.

The Dark Figure in the Doorway: Last Poems Morton Marcus

[whitepinepress-blog]

At the river's edge bear prints in the mud. The sharp outlines of pad and paw, the precisely placed trail of footsteps already slurring in the brown ooze. Gone now, nowhere to be seen. Only his prints returning to mud or, for a time, hardening into a brittle reminder that he was here. Prints like Chinese, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, these words.

The Dark Figure in the Doorway: Last Poems Morton Marcus

[whitepinepress-blog]

I have lived long enough to know that one day the earth will forget I am here, and will turn from me as if I was a beggar hot and dusty from the road. I will be abandoned in a marketplace by the living who will have gone home to lunch, leaving me with the broken crates, orange rinds and wilted lettuce. This does not disturb me. In a peculiar way it excites me, making me enter each new day like a beggar in a story who limps onto the page from over a hill...

The Dark Figure in the Doorway: Last Poems Morton Marcus