Cameron Morse

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Repose

Rest here a while.
Let the cold of the cratered
stoop persuade you to be
an ant for the day. Reconcile yourself 
to no great works of water
or wind. Surrender your hopes
and expectations and a robin
may step into the tangle of branches
above you, the welter of neurons,
a ball of barbed wire. A nest
may become the bubblegum in your sister’s hair,
the brainy wad she went to bed with
in her mouth. Lay your head
upon the doormat and the robin might alight
again, come and go again, and the limb
it leaps from will shake. It will stir.
Just as the life you thought you had in language
will return. You will pounce. Bite down
and let its juices drench your chin.
If you are a lion, you will slumber like a lion.
If you are a dog, you will need no pardon.

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Literal Light

Heat of the lit
leaves warms the wayward

side of my head. Light is
not a metaphor.

I am the seeing
eye only on a morning

in November
sun glistens like a tongue

licking the blacktop, slicking back
the cowlicks of leaves.

Mother Moisture, Father Heat,
who instilled a mind in me
to think these things?

Who is the wellspring
of my eyes

stretched open unto morning?
My mind, one step

at a time, word by word
unravels.     

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Cameron Morse

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review, a poetry editor at Harbor Editions, and the author of six collections of poetry. His first, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Far Other (Woodley Press, 2020). He holds and MFA from the University of Kansas City—Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and two children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.