Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Poems by Rusty Morrison
basin of hills...
in the decision of a beginning [3]
only gray rocks with drifting mist...
please advise stop [I might travel his death a creaking and swaying beneath me stop]
please advise stop [I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop]
please advise stop [my father's dying makes stairs of every line of text seeming neither to go up or down stop]
wind is...
Related Poems
The News from M—
by Lytton Smith
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

please advise stop [the rustle of a Sunday bundle of newspapers tucked under my father's arm stop]

 
by Rusty Morrison

the rustle of a Sunday bundle of newspapers tucked under my father's arm stop
and no father walking toward me stop
on the branch only oak leaves reddening as wind ripens their talent for exodus stop

on the lawn a scatter of wrens head-down but tail-erect stop
no bringing back the other world though every silence sounds for it stop
soft hiss then only all the rattle of useless memory caught in the unwieldy bundle of his dying stop

where I've tied it stop
waiting for the proscenium that the warblers' song might once again build around me stop
I purse my lips in an exaggerated exorcism of breath please advise







From the true keeps calm biding its story by Rusty Morrison. Copyright © 2008 by Rusty Morrison. Used by permission of Ahsahta Press.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.