First Things RSS Feed - Morri Creech

Little Testament

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Sure as that first command which strung the light
like thread onto a loom
to stitch the finished tapestry of sight,
he flips a switch and instantly the room
reweaves its intricacies
of warp and weft: chair canted against the wall,
nightstand strewn with coins and papers, shawl
draping one lamp whose shadow like a strain
has inched up to the brink
of his rucked sheets, over the herringbone grain
and knots of hardwood where he sees
the nicks and scuffs no brilliance can appall.

Soon he will shuffle down the hall
past photos of his elsewhere son and daughter
to lean over the face of the gray water
dappled with lather in the bathroom sink,
then round the narrow stairs
to where, tie brushing the granite countertop,
he will raise the bounty of his coffee cup
and break his crustless toast alone,
foreseeing the martyrdom of that day’s affairs:
the dolorous road to work, the bills and rent.

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Goldfinch

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Carel Fabritius. 1654, oil on panel, 35.2 cm. x 22.8 cm.

The bird is fiction though the paint is real—
the paint, that is, of the original.

This one’s a copy pasted in a frame.
Each hour the gold light on his wall’s the same.

He hangs between the cupboard and the fridge
where, day after day, it is his privilege

to see our windowed sunlight come and go,
eavesdrop on music from the stereo,

mark my ditherings or eye my bathrobed wife.
I think he’d trade his stillness for my life,

just as I often envy him his stasis.
O plump brown household god, what most amazes

is how, held in that perfect light from Delft,
chained to a narrow rail, perched on a shelf

in 1654, you look at us—
small finch that might have watched Fabritius

the year flame rendered him to ash. You stare
from a modest trompe l’oeil heaven we don’t share.

Mute bird, they’re finite, as you know, the days.
But sing to us. Sing of the light that stays.

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Birch Trees in Sunlight

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Though the clear morning stood
composed”cloud, dew, and leaf,
the whole shimmering wood”
now it all seems past belief.

We know what happened. How
a man came with his camera
to take these stills of bough
and branch. The old chimera

of harder days had gone
underground. But what brought
him here was not the dawn
light, the tall trunks caught

in chiaroscuro, or
twigs dense as tangled thread.
He’d seen these woods before.
Now past and present wed

the way, in textbooks, bone
at one turn of the page
will suddenly have grown
nerve, muscle, and cartilage”

those intricate details
obscuring what was there.
How to weigh these in the scales
”moss, lichen, the pure air”

with what we’ve already seen:
the fluttering rags, those drawn-
faced children beneath the lean
birches that earlier dawn?

Just so, the story ends
laved clean in August sun.
And still the mind contends
with what can’t be undone:

thick, sun-shot canopies
billowing overhead;
and, beneath the Polish trees,
those faces of the dead”

how beauty and brute fact
here buckle, overlaid
in snapshots, each exact,
in brilliance and in shade.

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