When I Was a Child
When I was a child it was clear
the stones are alive. Plunging in tall grasses,
almost lost to each other, we always
were meeting them in the new trails
each of us crushed, invisible to one another
but near, calling out, smelling the faint
sweetness in the afternoon drift of light. A stone
was no companionable creature like the wary
groundhog or blue jay watching us calmly far off,
the impassible grasshopper caught, waiting, staring
on our palms. The stones live another way, all stones
the same stone life, so strange—the dark ones, wet,
we stood on in the creek, the sandy ones
we tried to hurl across, the ones that hurt me,
the sandstone cliff, its tilted narrow path
of smooth stone where one day I slid and fell.
The learning of the life of stones
goes on. Later I’ve met
faint images of it flickering
in ideas: the hierarchy
of spirit; the physics of
tiny worlds—grains that wander
separate, each one chained down
to every other. No matter
where they lie or travel, each blown mote
an imperial center
never to be moved. I’ve admired
these poignant speculations, poor
forays into the first beaches
and forest fringes of
back when I was a child
and it was clear
the stones are alive.
This Is You
As the city spreads and closes in,
the only things left living
are humans. And these diminish
to nothing but gestures they still can make
themselves make. People who don’t exist,
not so much as in the mind’s wish,
the heart’s imagination, let alone on earth,
until they lift a finger by a labor of
the will. People only there
from the moment they wave a hand
they decide to lift to greet
the nonexistent others. Others like flashes,
like scarce motions of air. Others unknown
until a wave salutes them. Not here
until with a motion of salutation
they were sketched. Then from less than ashes
they get up, fill themselves in,
and live.
Looking around, they find themselves
torn between gratitude and horror.
There still is a world. This one, hidden
in the material city spreading wide,
closing in. This is you, crushed
field of faint gestures to things—motions—
infinite as a stirring too tiny,
too stifled, to be heard—bodies
that are names only
just now being made up, never yet said.
A. F. Moritz’s most recent books are The Garden: a poem and an essay (2021), As Far As You
Know (2020), and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), with Great Silent Ballad forthcoming in
fall 2024. His poetry has received the Guggenheim Fellowship; inclusion in the Princeton Series
of Contemporary Poets; the Ingram Merrill Fellowship; the Award in Literature of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters; the Beth Hokin Prize of Poetry magazine; and the Griffin Poetry
Prize, among others. Three of his books have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award in
poetry, Canada’s national arts award. His poems have been translated into many languages,
including selected poems volumes in Spanish and Greek.
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