Epilogue

Selected and Last Poems

Frederick Morgan, Paula Deitz

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781556596216
• eBook ISBN: 9781636280431
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.

from

POEMS OF THE TWO WORLDS

(1977)

“At the gate of the worlds stands Truth

and speaks a question into the world.”

I

In Silence

Patient things wait in nature,

having undertaken to be only what they are.

Crystals bedded in gneiss,

coral undersea,

robin eggs blue in the nest …

“I may love you” (I hear a voice whisper)

“but remain silent—

never come looking.

‘You’ may have to find me.”

“When it rained and rained …”

When it rained and rained

and I was a child

I looked from the windows

of “39”

across the slick street and

over the roofs

of three-storey houses—

brick and white trim—

hushed in the wetness

while high in the distance

above dim facades

water towers loomed …

until the front door

three flights below

slammed, and my father’s voice

rhythmic, searching

rose up the stairwell

calling a name,

the name that was mine—

and I cried out too

naming him back

in our secret tongue

and ran down the deep

stairway to find him:

we met at the heart

of the darkening house

as evening set in … Soon

the lights would go on.

Poem of the Gold Coin

A boy in a New York room spellbound by the snow

that drifts down persistently outside the window panes

has closed the door to his room: he moves things about—

games, pencils, books—from desktop to bookcase to floor,

then puts those things back in their places again.

The snow still falls. Nothing in the world has changed.

His desk is painted blue and has twelve cubbyholes

in which are lodged erasers, marbles, and a small

orange-sack filled with worn old Roman coins.

In a corner are stacked frayed piles of pulp magazines.

… A boy in Philadelphia watching the rain

that spills down chillingly outside the window panes

runs from his room and up back stairs to the attic

where he opens black rusting trunks and finds old silks,

daguerreotypes, disguises, daggers and

lastly, in the corner of an old brown burlap bag

a single coin—of gold. Spins it in the air!

—All changes then, accelerates—rain, snow,

New York, Philadelphia in alternation

as images of two boys shift, flickering,

and merge at times in a third who is everywhere.

Who is to tell which is real? (If either is.)

Or has each one, perhaps, made up the other?

Or must “I” come to tell it as it were my story?

If so, dark reader, “you” must imagine me.

Another change; and all is still and silent.

Empty fields extend along the shore

on which an empty ocean keeps on breaking …

No man nor boy nor beast—at most a bird or two:

space where the mind may seize its vaster being.

The Past

Wind from the frozen lake

in black New Hampshire night

froze the tears to my face.

It was 1936,

deep winter—as I ran

under an aching moon

(quite at the end of my tether)

back to the graceless halls

of that forbidding school

where stunted half-men ruled

our undefended lives.

I spoke to the self within:

“Freeze now and be still—

unyielding as this glass—

then, feel pain no more.”

That self obeyed, congealed;

I held it hard within

and thus we two survived.

But I would pay a price

for having a heart turned ice:

years and years must pass

before I loved at...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• A BOOK OF CHANGE (1972)
• POEMS OF THE TWO WORLDS (1977)
• DEATH MOTHER AND OTHER POEMS (1979)
• REFRACTIONS & SEVEN POEMS BY MALLARMÉ (1981)
• NORTHBOOK (1982)
• POEMS FOR PAULA (1995)
• THE ONE ABIDING (2003)
• LAST POEMS
• Acknowledgments
• Biographical Notes
• Back Cover