spring 2008
"Moon At Shuffleboard," for example, plays out a lovely conceit in which the moon "steps into the corner pub" to play shuffleboard with the speaker. Much more than an extended metaphor or a whimsical fantasy, the poem's images and music create magic and yearning.
Poems by John C. Morrison
Winner of the 2006 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition
Fairweather Books, an imprint of Bedbug Press
Brownsville, OR
$14.00, 65 pages
Reviewed by Cecelia Hagen
The mother of a friend of mine used to say, "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there."
Many of the poems in John C. Morrison's Heaven of the Moment demonstrate that it is possible to attain at least a kind of heaven while still alive. The only requirements are a close encounter with death, and the newly found appreciation for ordinary life that those who have faced death can cultivate, if they have the talent and the temperament. Luckily for us, Morrison has plenty of both.
Heaven of the Moment is Morrison's first book, and the winner of the 2006 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition. Morrison writes in a voice that makes us feel comfortable enough to trust him. He uses this warm tone to good advantage, taking us on comfy rides that end up in strange places before we notice that a bizarre turn or two has been taken. "Moon At Shuffleboard," for example, plays out a lovely conceit in which the moon "steps into the corner pub" to play shuffleboard with the speaker. Much more than an extended metaphor or a whimsical fantasy, the poem's images and music create magic and yearning.
"Porch Steps," the book's opening poem, starts out describing a woman the speaker passes each morning on his way to work. She sits on her porch in white pajamas and they wave to each other. But Morrison takes a giant leap from where we might expect this scenario to go. In the alternate life he imagines stepping in to, he earns his keep by "bolt(ing) gravity tight / at the poles and equator // of new planets" and giving directions to those who have just died, telling them, "After two days, / you'll reach heaven."
It's interesting here that Morrison imagines, first and foremost, a way to earn his keep. The book holds numerous references to low-level jobs: working in an ice plant, as a janitor, ripping out kudzu at a state park. Morrison makes good stories of these fringe occupations without glamorizing or glorifying himself or his coworkers. They weren't noble, particularly, or overly wild, but they were young, which counts for something in nobility and wildness, as we learn as we get older.
He describes a night job at a Del Monte plant, where he and his friends would write notes and pass them to the girls on the swing shift, who were leaving work each night just as the graveyard crew was arriving. "I'd write at break, the dead / center of night, as her strawberry hair / must've spilled across her pillow in sleep." Note how he breaks the line on "dead," subtly emphasizing that ever-present theme even in a poem about the fantasies of young love and the isolating grind of a crummy job.
In "A Hundred Years Ago" Morrison manages to make light of an oncologist telling him that, with his illness, he would have been dead if he'd lived a century earlier. He imagines himself on the range, tying "holster laces tight around my thigh" and hoping that his "swollen, / lumpy huevo is right tomorrow." Humor keeps the pathos at bay, so when we learn that "with celestial timing, I fathered / my second child who squirmed into conception / in my last weeks of healthy sperm" we're ready to cheer with the poet for the luck that has kept him here "nine years into the snores / of my summer child."
"Life Flight," one of my favorite poems here, also uses humor to deliver its point. With bang-up hard consonants all crashing together, the poet whimsically wishes that just once "that outrageous racket" of the life-flight helicopter would come for him, but "Not if it means I'm near dead" only, perhaps, to carry him upward as a "game schmuck who plays the role / to keep the crew sharp." This poem takes the notion of being rescued, of getting snatched from death's greedy claws, to new heights, literally.
"Spider Weather" is a poem of observation but, in the context of the book, serves as a musing on the poet's position in life. "These are the warm calm / days before fall strips the trees," he writes, when he's "spending time / with the fat orange and brown spiders" as they bind nearby objects to one another with their weaving. Even if one of the web's strands break, at this time of year "there is still time to mend / to thrive" Yet at some point in the near future we know there won't be time enough to mend, because "the first storm / shreds then washes the weaving away." This knowledge furnishes even more reason to observe the spiders, and to create and cherish our own connections while we can.
The final poem, "Spinoza and the Morning," resonates back through the book's themes of labor, loss, and love. Standing in the waiting room of the hospital where his father has just died, the speaker recalls a time years before when he worked as a late-night janitor. When work was done, he and his work buddy would drive "through the dim" as dawn approached, sipping dark beer as "light swept toward us, ... a wind from heaven to warm / our backs, lay our shadows in the grass." Here again we are left with shadows, but they are shadows in grass, and the bodies casting those shadows are warmed by a wind from—where else could it come from— heaven.
Cecelia Hagen's poems have appeared in Seattle Review, Prairie Schooner, Rolling Stone, and other publications. Her chapbook Fringe Living was published by 26 Books.