Photogravure Poem by Morgan Michaels

In a satinwood frame,
here is a picture for you.
The seasonal rains have quit,
leaving a collect-
a scrawl of water
bent into a river
remembering a southland.

Cloud-born hogsheads
gutted by upshots
of ground-down mountains
spilling off hillsides
sprouting sheaves of wheatgrass
have fashioned a river-
(or so you might believe)

leaving two year-larches
and untidy sumacs
lapped to the ankles
all around the pine scent
and the silver rustle of pine boughs,
one can believe.

The sun has come out
early as memory.
At the hill's edge the river makes a bed
where normally neither river nor bed is;
covers itself with fog and falls asleep-

an elbow of water
reed-stuck
going drowsily nowhere;
capitulant to slope
glad to be run-off,
hill-side seepage,
chocolatey swill of ferrous humus
pooled in an eddy

drowning the wheatgrass
drowning the tubers
a river when viewed
through the wrong end of a spy-glass
from far away only-
otherwise, a collect.

A stagnant, momentary
incubator of nymph-life
idle earth-seep
dried in a week
in fields that stretch away.

In its face
cloud recognizes itself.
Thick-enough-to-kick fog
covers it, mornings,
it parts and closes behind.
Subliminal sweat of the earth.
The sun has come out.

And, stickmen stalk the shallows
casting long, purple shadows
on the yellow, pale water,
water lapping their shins.
They stand or mill
searching for something
something in the water
something somebody lost
something shiny and enamel
that gleams in the shallows
but, disappears
when the wind blows.