Karen McAferty Morris
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Italian Autumn The wisps of cirrus clouds are herald angels blowing their trumpets. Woodland leaves flash coppery red and the gold of a Pope’s ring. In another September years ago, I watched the great Italian tenor’s return to his hometown. Yellow sunflowers covered his casket, and white roses and long-needle pine boughs, the sky a clear blue, the priests’ robes purple. I listen to him sing now, the sound turned down low, and remember that autumn in Italy. Where the backyard was filled with stippled brown sparrows tugging seeds off the tall, lithe grasses, and burnished chestnuts had fallen along the ancient town walls, and at the market I bought long, soft pears with barely any core. I had an emptiness inside me, an exile from modern life made too easy, and too difficult from love spent and split like seed pods. My aloneness enfolded me. I rarely heard words I understood. I filled the days with writing, and hours losing my way through strange streets. I found a freedom and a perplexity I last knew as a child. But the Veneto is in the north, and cold when November comes, and the time came to go home. “Nessun dorma” he sings. None shall sleep. Not until the mystery is solved. Beyond the window of the departing train, I saw a lone Italian persimmon tree, the caci, its trunk and limbs blackened, somehow full of ripe, bright orange fruit. ** On a Sidewalk to Everywhere From my front porch, I walk across the u-shaped driveway onto a sidewalk gated by two shaggy gardenia bushes, a sidewalk that ends abruptly 10 feet from the road, like a sidewalk to nowhere. The early morning falls green and gold around me, and sheltered by other towering shrubs, I am in the bull’s eye of secrecy. In nearby trees, blossoms are turning inside out, becoming fruit. Beneath its covering, the loquat’s large brown seed is being swaddled in tart orange. On tiny stalks the faded flower lifts the infant grapefruit out like little green seed pearls. The sidewalk’s faded red surface feels smooth on my bare feet. I remember when my granddaughter made it bloom with pastel chalk flowers. Liriope softens the straight edges, lilac spikes rising from the thick fountains of green. Ahead of me across the asphalt road, the drainage ditch sprouts with wiregrass and fragile daisies. Behind me along the front porch, rosemary releases its fragrance to the warming air, tiny pink roses spread across prickly green like summer’s misty stars, Easter lilies’ frilled leaves are crowned with long buds swelling in a wink of yellow petals. A mockingbird watches me from the power line, another cascades melodies from somewhere up in the pine. Nothing can see me here. Nothing can touch me, except translucent clouds of gnats floating like bubbles, and the giddy bumblebee bumping among the white, barely opened clusters of the sweet viburnum. Nothing else, except the morning’s tenderness and winsome beauty, the way it stretches its arms out as if just waking up, yawning. The heartbreaking impermanence of it all. ** Oak Fall Pots of chrysanthemums roost on the brick steps of my front porch like bright-kerchiefed friends settled in for a chat. The slope of my front yard gleams cool green. In their crescent-shaped patch, the herbs—basil, parsley, mint, thyme, tarragon—elbow each other, spectators at an outdoor concert jostling for the best seats. It’s September. And it is beginning. Soaring oak trees that loom higher than the rest are already shedding their dry, café-au-lait leaves of rejected-Christmas-tree shapes, marring every pretty thing in sight. Parachuting down on the herbs, shrouding their intricate designs and quelling their aroma. Creeping down the lawn like guerilla fighters. Brittle intrusions sticking up among the downy chrysanthemums. The little evergreen wears them like paper ornaments, torn, faded, generations old. And they cause so much work. Raking, blowing, bagging. Long before the maple and the dogwood yield to the loss of long summer light and redden. If I sweep them away, they are back in no time. Sometimes they cascade down like an Act V curtain. Like something else, like those travails, those hardships that fall, that we must numbly accept and bear. That for a time can be forgotten—like the oak fall absent in bare, listless winter, or at the rosy bud break on the vine, or when I stretch my hand to the grape. Yet the season of oak fall will return. ** Forsythia Forsythia takes me back. The bitter-cold, colourless winter here in north Alabama loitered far too long, and by March, like a shipwrecked soul scouring the horizon, I was poised for any sign of a green stem or leaf. A merciless hurricane had flooded our coastal house, and we became expatriates, abandoning our quartz-pink camellias and the amethyst blossoms of the cherry tree, to endure wrinkled-hand oak leaves smothering every surface except the outcroppings of boulders, white-streaked gray petrified Jurassic herbivores. At last, daffodils, hard-crayoned yellow, then swarms of white pear, delicate lavender magnolia, branch-hugging redbud. And forsythia. Some twenty years ago I took a picture of them, blazing candelabra, at my parents’ South Carolina home. Any sighting now recalls my mother and father, the country-road walks when I composed poetry in my head as I strolled by cornfields, inquisitive cows, draping vines, gourds strung for purple martin homes—sometimes in tears from some passing grief and finally a lasting grief when they died. Forsythia rush forth to feel the crisp air of early spring. To see them blooming here in Alabama, with their sky-seeking branches of lemony flowers, reminds me of all my homes, my longings, my seasons of exile. ** A Field of Moss Moss covers my front lawn instead of grass. All winter whenever I looked out the window, for a moment I thought it was spring. Yesterday in a churchyard I twisted through a labyrinth of brick and sand, thoughts turned inward, centering, peace-bearing. Now I carry lighter footsteps over the velvety cushion of moss, stoop to run my fingers across it, this rough-soft elfin field, deep peridot, mosaiced with emerald clover, tiny violets, pecan shell halves, and acorn caps. In this diminutive landscape I imagine dangerous jewel beetles blending, lurking, a minefield of tiny Fabergé eggs, exquisite. What lilliputian creatures do crawl here? Moss has softened the earth for some 400 million years. I want to examine the small, the lowly, to slip into their ancient landscape. The miniaturist’s hand is comprehensive and guides us, ascending into imagination. ** These prose poems first appeared in Significance: Poems of Small Encounters (National League of American Pen Women, 2022.) ** Living in two beautiful places, north Alabama and the Florida panhandle, Karen McAferty Morris writes about nature and everyday people. Her poetry has been recognized for its “appeal to the senses, the intellect, and the imagination.” It has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Sisyphus, The Louisville Review, Black Fox, The Ekphrastic Review, and Canary. Her collections Elemental (2018), Confluence (2020), and Significance (2022) are national prize winners. A member of the Emerald Coast Writers and the National League of American Pen Women, Karen lists reading, hiking, traveling, and spending time with family as favourite pastimes. |
