The Fork-In-The-Road Indian Poetry Store (Earthworks) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Phillip Carroll Morgan is an enrolled Choctaw/Chickasaw bi-lingual poet who has enjoyed a 25-year artistic collaboration with his painter-sculptor wife, Kate Arnott Morgan. This collaboration has seen the birth of three children, as well as the production of The Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store, which won the 2002 Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award for Poetry. He has worked as a newspaper editor, business executive, building tradesman, guitar player, and rancher. He is currently a PhD student in Native Literature at the University of Oklahoma.

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Earth Life

got a little summer breeze heater

in the tool room of the barn

that my apprentice and i built last fall

got a salvaged slightly-cupped

age-weathered

extra-wide

pine board for a writing table

where i struggle

to round off the edges

of these words which cling

to the paper

like sticktight burrs to my socks

table rests

in pale winter light

channeled through the window

salvaged from an wooden hangar

they tore down at an airfield

on the endwall of the small room

the comforting durable old piano

i searched for

and found

at the countryside junk store

looks over my shoulder

like a shadowing grade school mother

the window opens onto

an old growth prairie oak forest

contrasted this bloodless january day

by a carpet of fine snow

grasses look flash frozen

where their stiff gray-blonde stems

protrude through the powder

like the bristling yellow hair of an ancient

i yearn for winter to cry out

but nothing is profound today

just cold

the statuesque cows

the silent birds

i had to cut some extra firewood

standing on plywood to keep my feet dry

put on two pair of long underwear

inspired by eight degrees and a north wind

a hot water pipe froze at the kitchen sink

i’m happy that my homespun

house does not strive toward

an illusion of perfection

happy that i cannot ignore the weather

i enjoy gathering fuel for heat

from hoary wise deadfall

in this crosstimbers grove

or immature greenwood

that complains alongside the road

when the utility people cut trees

in the right-of-way

i like having to do

a combination of things right

to keep my well water from freezing

it’s a colorless day

argued with the wife

for no particular reason

early winter stress spent the whole day

in the house together yesterday

i love this life

life on planet earth

i hated planet metro and planet automatic

no struggle

no reward for struggling there

only a monotonous sense of uniformity

no beginnings no endings no triumphs

no natural catastrophes no entertainment

only perversion and stimulation

this earth life is my road

it’s unpredictable

there’s no map

no hocus pocus suggestion

that i am almighty

because i’m the only one

who has ever lived my life

i must travel the trail expectantly

it comes off trite to say

that even dullness is perfect

the excellence and symmetry of

winter and dormancy

are hard things to express

like the beauty of sleep

or the beauty of death

but any lesser view of cycle and rhythm

seems childish

foolish even