On a Witch's Dare: Selected Poems and Plays

By Joseph Morton

This book contains selected poems running the gamut of emotional experience. It also contains two linked comedy stage plays, each in two acts, and a linked one-act "mystery" play.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543919424

Book preview

© Joseph Morton 2017

Print ISBN: 978-1-5439-1-941-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5439-1-942-4

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

Poems about Poetry

Poems of love

Poems about Brisco Point

Poems about life

Poems about California

Poems to laugh with

Poems about childhood

Poems about kids and Christmas

Plays

Poem

I lie here,

a small scattering of black bones

on white sand.

You find me,

and I breathe.

Your Tea, My Dear

Big, blubbery lips are best for Poetry,

the kind that blabber, blissful or bellicose

(no matter), that love alliterative loops,

that cannot summon the muse Calliope sans

the issue of at least a little spit spray,

pursed for tasting words like prunes,

like tangy tangerines, like licorice,

caring little or less for the rumble of rhyme.

Poetry loves long, lazy hair

that must be wiped out of reading’s way,

luxurious, lustrous, like seashore waves

and dense as wheat rolling in the wind,

evoking a tormented source,

a seething desire for excess,

a tumultuous tendency to wildness, tamed,

a promise there is more where that came from.

Necktie askew, sports jacket tweed

this time of year, scuffed leather shoes,

clashed colors,

whatever shows materialism in neglect,

therefore the perfect foil

for Poetry,

that star in a night sky,

that pearl’s spark in the muddy oyster’s mucus.

For, comes the voice,

as Robert said, the sound of sense,

and that’s what truly counts.

For Poetry, remember, is a song

and Poetry as silent prayer is wrong,

or not quite right, not quite complete,

for here is where our thoughts and sound do meet.

A deep and ominously rumbling voice,

one sounding summoned from a golden cave

accommodates that poetry whose grave

and daring cause gives sense to such a choice;

then, Tennyson, say, read by James Earl Jones?

A crisp and flinty voice, like that of Frost

himself, the flint a tool of sharpest stones

used in his voice to carve the truth once lost

to us, to strike a spark to light a fire,

to marry what we know with our desire.

And so it goes. Let’s rest and sip our tea.

I’ll read you one, then you read one to me.

The Wind and the Beast

You never say you love me, moaned the wind.

The beast spread out his arms in wide embrace

and felt her press, then swirl, then race

away to flap a flag, to huff and send

a cloud of dust his way. I love you, Wind,

he said. "I love the grace you give a field

of wheat. I love the dangerous power you wield

when flinging seas and hurling rain." He grinned

as she flew back and ruffled him, then wrapped

around and drifted down. "I know

you’re there, the beast whispered. I’m breathing you;

I always do. And if some day you flew

away for real the beast in me would go."

You only say you love me, moaned the wind,

to keep the beast within your selfish heart.

Beasts are that way, he cried. "We can’t pretend

to be or not, don’t have a wind’s capricious art."

—Love, 1986

VALENTINE MAN

He will with passion bring her flowers.

She will reward him with a smile,

and he will marvel at the powers

of roses for a little while.

He will with fervor bring her candy.

She will repay him with a kiss,

and he will think his ploy quite handy

in winning o’er a chubby miss.

He will, determined, bring her jewels.

She will, impressed, take him to bed,

and he will think the others fools

who gave more flimsy gifts instead.

Yet, I would bring you verse to read:

In it, smell sweet red rose and taste

the salty tang of taffy. Indeed,

behold the very gem—the paste?

Now, feel my arms surround you so.

And, seek the depths of my blue eyes.

And, touch your lips to mine and know

my heart with yours soars through the skies.

And know, unlike the gift of things,

this verse to you of true love sings.

—for Dee, Valentine’s Day, 2012

Love’s Spark

The poets claim that Eros cannot see,

point out unlikely couplings as their proof,

explain that only blindness keeps aloof,

uncannily, the perfect he and she.

And this near random love, you must agree

—much to the ire of Puritans: the kinds,

you know, who need control of hearts and minds—

makes life most interesting for you and me.

The perfect love would give you perfect bliss,

would block you from the slightest form of strife.

The wise, though, claim the blind don’t know the dark;

with nothing to compare it to they miss

its true significance, that bliss in life

depends on dark; how else to see love’s spark?

—2/14/01

Thanksgiving, 2004

Had anybody said

when I was twenty

—thirty even—

that some day

I’d have these incredible hots for this sixty-year-old babe?

My head would have recoiled

as if from a bad smell,

my lips curled on one side,

registering distaste.

I would have envisioned

yellow-eyed old women

with ankle skin like

wrinkly

old

socks,

with slick-backed, spotted hands,

bloated, crooked fingers, quivering

at their task.

None of this is true,

of course,

not of you, somehow.

But even if it were,

when you look at me that way,

your voice back in your throat,

your breathing quick to say

some strange words, remote

from the moment’s sense of things,

or maybe just from my own hearing,

which, like the rest of me, by now

floats

on the shock of your sexuality,

on the rising of desire.

And, so, your beauty rescues me

from a young man’s addiction

to facade

and from

that shallow notion

of

satisfaction.

The Person You Deserve

Just what am I? I wonder on this day

supposedly reserved for thoughts of you.

I am a role in an unwritten play:

a name, a face, a shape, an overdue

potential. This is not small. To be

the books I’ve read—that in itself—makes more

of me than Homer ever dreamed. To see

the sights I’ve seen—the earth from air, men soar

to stand upon the moon, the ocean floor—

makes more of me than Plato ever knew.

And you—my Helen who, had there been four

of lusty, charming Paris, would stay true—

makes more of me than all the Greeks at Troy.

And, if all that I knew I could employ

to hammer dreams into reality,

you’d find the person you deserve in me.

—Feb. 1990

As Wine, So Love

I’ve come to think what’s true of wine is true

also of love. Intoxication speeds

from both, charged hot with passion’s urgent needs

and equal in virility though aged or new.

Yet, some maintain that wine will sure undo

the certain good that’s always built of love,

that buried in the grape’s the heart, my Dove,

of Dionysus who’s come for you

to share a bitter end. They miss the point.

For love is every bit as like to lead

one the wrong way, depending on the need

it satisfies. Use love, use wine: anoint

with either one an object, act, or thought

and each will shine as if divinely wrought.

—2/11/15, for Dee, on Valentine’s Day

WONDERING

I was just thinking how much I will miss life

when it’s gone.

But, then I wondered how I would even know

when it’s gone?

For won’t it take me with it

as it leaves?

Am I not so important to my life,

to my own life,

that it would have a lot of trouble moving on

without me?

And you! And us! Do things just fall apart

in the end?

Do things like life and love just tumble away

untangling?

If not, I ask you, how not? How not,

but in our dreams?

If so, we’d better love us hard and fast

and hold on tight.

—for Dee on her birthday, March 20, 2017

Happy

Just how did you get in my head?

You did it on a witch’s dare

by hiding in the breath of air

I took on verge of sleep. Then said

you to your magic friends: "I bet

he’ll never get away from me.

I hear his thoughts, see what I see

through his own eyes. The net

I cast is inside-out, and so

I’m in him like a pleasant dream."

And so, in wake and sleep you seem

attainable almost, but no.

I see you there against the wall

of a confusing dream. I reach

for you, I call, I wave, but each

attempt somehow falls short, and all

you do is smile. But in the end

the simple fact you’re there is good.

For neither have I touched, nor should

I, laughter or tears; they send

to me their messages: touch me.

And, thus, you hover like a muse,

like a protecting angel; you use

your place in me to help me be

happy.

—for Dee on Valentine’s Day, 2009

AEOLUS Brisco

After the morning rain that swamped

our gutters into gangs of gargling fools,

the sky broke open wide and blue

and laughed a roaring wind

as though to say it all had been a joke,

for look what you’ve got now:

a chuckling of pine cones skipping,

dancing crazily

out of laughter’s awesome roar.

(5/15/13)

Toliva Shoal

I stand on our deck overlooking Dana Passage,

where sailboats of the Toliva Shoal Race

break through the surge of ebbing tide at Brisco Point

and head for home, Squaxin to starboard,

Boston Harbor to port, then that excruciatingly straight, long leg

down Budd Inlet: Olympia.

You’re not here: snowed-in down in Salem,

so can’t get back home, but here on the island

we’ve had sunshine and, lately, thin clouds

slithering in over the tree line.

I don’t like it: not these clouds,

not waiting the hours between telephone calls.

The chicken thighs ignite on the barbecue,

try to incinerate themselves in their own fat.

Quickly I remove them from the inferno and try to remember

Benedick’s exact words: There’s a double meaning to that?

It’s been a long race by now,

out around the mound of Devil’s Head and up past Anderson and McNeil to the Toliva Shoal,

then back, in the middle of February cold.

Boats blooming big, bright spinnakers

have mostly passed, leaving those hauled by slender jibs

to ply on into descending dusk. Then south is smudged gray

by a huge, white nylon stocking-like fog

being pulled up the silver strand of Dana toward the stragglers below.

I lift the hood, flip the thighs, and worry about those trailing boats—

darkness falling, and now the fog—and worry, too,

you might grow impatient and drive for home: snow to fog.

So, I remember our fogs, one out of Port Townsend

pressing us eastward against Whidbey Island when we wanted

to go north and west through Cattle Pass, the suspense

of steering west into the fog at Deception Pass, the short-lived relief as it melted away

only to become big quartering wind and seas forcing our escape into Mackaye Harbor.

Or, that morning off the east coast of Orcas

when, rowing a dinghy, Doug materialized out of the fog

laughing at himself because,

of all people, he should have known the growl-and-beep

of a bulldozer on the beach when he heard it, he figured.

Turns out, this time, it’s not fog at all. It’s snow and I’m relieved.

Everyone will find their way home.

Eventually, I remove the chicken, scrub brush the grill,

turn off the gas, enter the somehow surprising warmth of indoors

and wonder, now, what to do about Valentine’s Day;

which of the assorted scraps of beginnings seems most promising?

At this, I enter another kind of fog, the more common one for me,

and wish the strength of my creativity were directly proportional

to the strength of my missing you.

—February 8, 2014, for Dee, for Valentine’s Day

Forced Laughter

Whoever hears the eagle laugh

will learn this simple truth:

whoever lives a life of wrath,

a life where talon, beak or tooth

sustains itself in blood and gore

will have no single friend,

will laugh and laugh and laugh some more

in trying hard not to pretend.

—Harstine Island, WA (1/16/14)

Where Sea Meets Shore

Why would one walk a sandy beach

where waves wash wanly on the shore

and, graceful, sway just out of reach

and, languid, lisp, Forever more?

Why would one castles carve for hours

only to watch invading tide

o’errun the moats and topple towers

and melt all back to sand seaside?

Why would one if he had a choice

instead not trod a rocky shore

where jagged waves in giant voice

come clattering, then, back for more,

come plunging in and shattering

themselves to foam and stinging spray?

For liquid does the battering

’til solid rock does back away.

And, where upon a sandy beach

does one find cavities of pools

where tiny creatures within reach

teach big and little kids some rules?

There’s magic here, where sea meets shore.

There’s strife and love, there’s more, there’s more.

—8/08/12

That Time of Year

(Dana Passage as seen from Harstine Island on the morning of Sept. 27, 2012)

That time of year.

The rising sun ignites our swath of Puget Sound

into a cauldron of red fog,

evolving as the morning rises

orange to gold before washing out, white.

The fog makes gray-charcoal smudges

over the jagged range of dark Douglas-fir

that forms the back-lit eastern shore

of Dana Passage.

A breeze drags fog

into tatters

through pointed treetops

making way for sunshine

to pop out colors here and there,

green and turning orange and gold

among the mix of maple, madrone, alder

along the lower shore.

The long-necked grebes are back,

tossing silvery minnows in golden beaks.

Sun glints off the smooth head

of the patrolling seal

who sometimes humps

and is swallowed under the silver surface.

Bald eagle skims the silver surface north,

pursued it seems and yet ignoring the

frenzied dance of seagulls

in its wake.

This time of year

sunshine begins its long decline

and rain clouds gather in the south

and big, black spiders begin

to make their way indoors.

—Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012

Golf Lesson

The teacher’s cheerful voice etches

the blank slate of chill morning air

and scribbles

across the monotonous

cooing of the mourning dove.

Soon, women of the putting lesson

pop small, white, dimpled balls rolling gently

over the green grass, blinking

among sunshine-stretched shadows

slanting out long from their feet.

Then, sprinklers sputter suddenly

into silver rooster tails

that choo-choo-kachoo

over the driving range beyond,

and a passing golf cart’s rumble

mindlessly smudges the teacher’s words

so she smiles and waits

patiently.

FORGETTING STUFF

I swear, I’ve done this since I was small,

so I know for sure it has nothing at all

to do with age. Unless, of course,

I was old at birth. But, that’s a horse

of a different color, or brand. Anyway,

what happens is, I start off, let’s say,

for the kitchen to get