Behind Mill Trail
by Daniel Morgan
That lilac glow against the grasses
Showered softly like a sleep.
And all about the world’s hill-top,
Where clouds wear pink when no one sees,
Those two felt, within themself
(The quick grin and slow-spreading smile),
The need to bask and nothing else.
Not far below but straight ahead
An estuary wrapped its way
Between the river and the sea
And forked them in an island there
So it could make its getaway.
The boy, for that was all he was,
First spoke to the sweatered blue
And stole the dandelion she hummed into.
"I wonder how men stay inside
And write in cabins of their mind
To tease in wisdom and delight
At their own jokes. Perhaps they stumbled
On some great conversation.
High-wheeling overhead,
Sometimes faintly, sometimes never
Heard at all among the dull
And hard of hearing."
"Thinking they’re
The more urbane and common man
For chiseling Tarpeian things
Out of quicksand philosophies."
She said this last because her toes
Played well within the hill’s cool hair
And failing to hold a laugh inside,
She ruffled his introspective stride
And grin with her slow-spreading smile.
"Or could they list to deeper 'motions,
Creating from nothing to call into being,
The planes and the forms of the lofty foundations —"
"— For other airhead generations,"
She stopped him with a huffy glare:
"What if all those decomposers
Meant to do was cut a dyke
Before the dying hordes of boredom
And confusion?"
"You suppose
The figure that a sonnet makes
So delicately trimmed to bloom
Is numbered for a greenback note
To pay for love and cheap cigars?"
He spurned her lackidaisiness
And lit and sent a spume of his
Own drugstore smoke to meet the clouds.
"A word may not be this sunset
Or voices of a vespersong,
But inbetween the pictured sound
Is more than me and most of you.
A bridge can stand so long as we
Have either side, both sea and sky;
A merism can never lie.
For all your effervescent smiles,
You cannot hide unless you seek."
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