Mark McMorris
Anaphora of Shadows
1
I wrote a poem waiting on you to come
I made a list of herbs, I threw out a line
below a column of digits scrawled in mud
and I sat on a boulder, in the shade of an
ash,
with branches over the river and mosquitoes
jawing in humidity that the sun made heavy
I made paper from the mud and the leaf
The pen I made from the beak of a macaw
knew its way without my word, and when sun
struck its pose above the tree-line, began
to lean
and throw a shadow on the face of the water.
4
I wrote a poem waiting on you to come
in self-defense I made a list of errors, hats
of many shapes and colors—I asked for
a sample—
I wrote a conical blue hat, a hat in a square
made from silk and dyed in a steaming vat
of indigo desires, and the hat in a circle
the horizon with a few stalks of grass
to mark the limit of sight, figments of grass
too dry and too thin to shelter your transit
The poem omits the shadow that your voice
filters like charcoal from whispering water.
Mark
McMorris was born and raised in Kingston,
Jamaica. He is the author of several books
of poetry, including Palinurus Suite (Paradigm,
1992), Figures for a Hypothesis (Leave,
1995), Moth-Wings (Burning Deck,
1996), and The
Black Reeds (University of Georgia
Press, 1997). He teaches at Georgetown
University
in Washington, D. C.
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