Poetry by Darren Morris
Darren Morris is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia, who has lost much of his sight to retinitis pigmentosa. His long-form hybrid work, "Eisegesis 1-3," won the 2024 Experimental Poetry Prize from the Connecticut Poetry Society. Recent work appears at Willow Springs Magazine, Stone Circle Review, Redivider, and The Yale Review. Poems are forthcoming from the American Poetry Review and failbetter.
Warm February
The gods have not left us yet
but descend as snow geese for chaff
and at twilight move to water.
All night flotillas sleepwalk
between matterless properties
like stars just beyond our seeing.
But they are what is not:
vague surfaces in the pitch dark,
relented of instinct & calling.
Mathematics of broken longing.
Vagrant desire. An argument unsettled.
A mind that is & shall always be.
Though they will be gone by morning.
The Horses
In Kentucky, I went to see the living
museum of former derby winners,
horses who were put to pasture
of sweet bluegrass & dew-soft
grew old there after sire or foal
in a contentment only animals know
& of which humans might only dream
as some Edenic scene or paradise.
They brought them, one by one, into show,
escorted them after video of their most
magnificent days. I have never been
visited by angels or gods, or if so,
beyond my know. But when a champion
strides out elegant as fleet Atalanta,
there is no mistaking the quick architectures
of flesh that made the beast before us more,
nor more particularly of the earth & it of them,
part & parcel of the planet, ancient
& austere. She was led away, the aging
marvel still marvelous, yet nervous
as a bird, for it was too much for her now
to present before a crowd. Then to see her
again, later, paired with a gray workhorse
with a spotted rump, and he resigned, steady
at her side. She nipped him neatly on the neck
to say that she was yet alive, and he with
her rope between his teeth. Two lovers, articulate
in the science of love that knows no competition.
To see them together was to see the world
that always was, the world that was together.
The Old Men
Old men who hang the light on hooks
who heap the snow upon toddlers' graves,
& brave the morning's night, so cold,
bend & brace their gray-haired ways.
The old too old to do what they are told
so do without & eat their joys.
They wipe their feet, are done with us,
ash the fire & cupboard close,
stand & wash the dirty plates & sing
of that, as yet unknown, far-off place.
Then make the sound that quiet makes.
How like them have we become, the boys
who once slept late through snow, now
list to dream as nothing were to keep
& feel them fill our narrow doors.
Pull the chain in patient pause of some
unmarked appraise. Linger there a moment
more in dim dissolve of those old, old days.