John Morgan
	Above The Tanana: For Jim Simmerman (1952-2006)          “Landscape is an after-thought, like hope.”—J.S. Sun ratchets off a fish-wheel like machine- gun spray. An airboat blasts upriver flaunting the rack of a dismantled moose. An island like a coffin floats off-shore, and black spruce grow from it, green rockets questing skyward like the piquant vows I’ve made while sitting on this shelf—to trust in life, not death. Two months ago you put an end to pain though I just heard today. Grief takes my skull, noon spins toward dusk, dim lights on water, murky shapes, dissolving branches, slime the river carries as your corpse decays. Oh, Jim! I’ve sifted the peevish facts—two hip replacements failed, your last pooch given away, a recent love estranged—you’d been to hell and back—and so on whiskey and what else you pulled the curtain, left us here to plumb the tale. This was the summer of yellow-jackets, of wasps and fatal stings. A whale got beached and rotted sixty miles from here, six hundred from the coast. These aberrations clustered round your death. And paging through your letters (back when we wrote such things) I found a sly request for “one of those river poems.” No urgency I’d figured, figured we’d grow old together in the craft, mellow like two peppers in a pot, or like some aging boy band, you on bass and me on uke. Four days you lay alone, four days. I hold my breath and see that jaunty walk and cheeky grin shut down. You’d seemed a buoyant optimist, an army brat, black belt and softball buff, but under those riffs a darker music thrummed. I heard it louder the last time we met, as, antsy, less in focus on your meds, you pulsed a hunger to be somewhere else, to step outside your pain. The pain I couldn’t see. I see it now, that slough in which the self begins to drown. At The Farmhouse In West Branch (1965)         for Bob Grenier Your guests had to wade through a pig-sty, so you’d greet us at the gate and prod those massive porkers out of the way with the handle of a broom. In back of the rented house, we strolled in the shade of walnuts and mused on our trade, while you bagged the fallen fruit— which wasn’t like stealing, you said, since they’d only rot on the ground. Inside, you laid out the treasures you’d picked up last summer at Groliers, the latest Ashbery teasers and another little-known poet whose bare-boned fluted quatrains, cold as the Minnesota sky, you’d squint and cackle at. You read the world like that—through the eyes of poetry—until sky and piglets and walnuts (which Emily baked into pies) unshackled my bookish soul and my love began to unfurl the first acceptable stanzas I ever wrote, while Emily, as her pregnancy advanced, jotted on greasy napkins, God knows how, the knock-out poem of the year in the bitchy fastidious voice of a mother sow.