RUSTY MORRISON
TWO POEMS
WALKWATCH (10)
When 4 am dark is narrow, I feel it before
I leave the bed. I pull the narrow into my
thighs, walk out of the house, up the steep
hill of the Arlington. I am sure to wear my
glasses, so I’ll see the sharp, narrow lights
far above me succeed in breaking through
night-sky’s dark. I need the narrow, now,
in my fingers as I type. I learned it
decades ago, when I started shooting
meth—draw back my thumb at the angle
to balance a syringe’s small circular top
on my thumbnail as I pull the correct
dosage of liquid into the syringe, and then
feel what I thought was the exacting
precision of a changeless certainty. It
wasn’t. But the skill of narrow precision—
all that I’ve taken with me from my year
of shooting meth. I feel it in my thighs on
this early-morning walk. In each foot’s
impact on pavement, risking wherever
precision leads—this morning I step into
fear. I draw that into the stride, trusting
the rhythm of this instant of walking, no
matter how it might change the next
instant, change me, change where this
might lead. Last night, I needed to narrow
my eyes as I read the new poem Cassie
sent me. So few words on a line. Not
forcing a line’s meaning to come any
sooner than it might have come to her,
come for her, as she typed, come for me,
now, as I read for the narrower passage
within the meaning to take me farther
than I knew I’d had the courage for. My
left foot first—this has become an
obsession of starting out the door in the
morning, a form of reliability, a ritual, that
I allow to be as frighteningly necessary as
the ritual of my childhood, wearing the bit
of white lace on my head required for a
Catholic girl going into church, even when
mass wasn’t in session, when no others
were in the pews. Once, the lace slipped,
fell to the church floor. My sharp intake of
breath, so loud that a nun sitting in a pew
praying looked up. Such shock on her
face—not because the lace fell, I realized,
but for the look she saw on mine. What
had she seen there? I’m drawing into my
thighs that unknowable expression I
wore, which remains mine, as I look to the
top of the hill where the Arlington turns.
I’m filling my lungs, my blood, with that
look, which narrows as it gains force—
what has always been fear and, more than
fear, awareness that nothing can protect
me from whatever might come. I draw
that in. Langer says, look for any
expression and, whatever expression you
are seeking, you will find. At my front
door, I notice and reach down to pick up
the Monday morning New York Times
where it rests this morning in its blue
plastic wrapper, and I feel everything is a
symptom of the expression I am seeking. I
pick up the news and I step inside.
WALKWATCH (11)
Mid-walk, mid-dark, the hill steepest here,
and I feel again how I’m frightened of my
mind, the texture of my need to talk to
myself, the pressure, which has no taste
for me. It’s the same as when I can’t taste
the cereal and yogurt in my spoon. Can I
ever taste it? Do I want to? Last night,
when Ken’s eyes were fixed on a difficult
email he was composing on his computer
screen; I knew better than to interrupt
him again. The words I’d wanted to say
were inconsequential. I knew this, yet all I
could feel was the pressure to be seen and
cared about, so large—the pressure, but
not the taste of what it would mean to
have his eyes on me, friendly eyes. Right
now, I want to feel my feet, my pace,
walking in this morning’s dark, I want to
taste the motion, even as I walk too fast,
as if to escape the realizations I have
when I walk. I want to taste the fear in
that. This is a start. I paid so much for the
feeling meth gave me, that I thought
inured me to everything around me, that I
trusted a filled syringe could give. This is a
start—even if it’s only to be frightened of
what I’ve constructed to take its place.
How many houses have I walked past?
How much of this moment have I lost? I’m
inside my memory of the look on Ken’s
face when I spoke, needlessly. He didn’t
understand that I knew what I was saying
was unimportant. Knew the abject clarity
of useless need in my words. “Abject
clarity.” Both words have a “t” that hits
sharp and hard, like my feet hitting the
pavement in the dark. Pay attention, I tell
myself, though my mind is ‘rushing’ from
this moment. I’m already thinking of the
work I’ll do once I get home, how I’ll
reread the edits I need to send to a
consultation client, and revisit the
decision I need to make to accept or not
accept a manuscript for publication, and a
set of bills I’ll organize and then choose
which ones to pay. The stars, as I look up,
seem too bright in the 4 am sky, now,
now, now. A porch light, glowing from the
freshly painted house to my left, is smug
with factory-furnished meanings of
‘welcome’ in its warm pearl pleasantry.
The manufacturer probably markets it
suggestively, as if light had a sensation to
impart, and I feel superior in my little
realization, which is tasteless and leaves
me more bereft, though I want to pretend
it is carrying me. I’ve lost myself again,
where the rise is steepest, here, where I’m
looking up at my grandmother’s face as
she keens. I don’t want her to see that I’m
watching her from my uncomfortable
position in her lap. I’m eight. It’s the
morning after the night she found my
grandfather beside her, dead from a heart
attack, and I know I’ve been put here to
have some use, while my mother and her
cousins manage what is logical to be
accomplished in a house where someone
irreplaceable has died. The rocking
motion of my grandmother, I realize—it’s
not because of her grief. She’s rocking for
me, as if this motion would be a comfort
as she holds me. I stop walking, but even
stillness won’t bring back the inkling I’d
just had of something more in that
memory I should understand. I’m here, in
front of my computer screen, afraid to
change my posture as I type, knowing any
stray motion will break the stride of
words moving toward an idea I sense I’ve
already lost. Even here, with my stack of
dog-eared paperbacks beside me. The
steepest part of the Arlington is
somewhere inside each of them. I’ll open
one, but the steepest part stays just a
sentence or two ahead of my eyes as I
skim for it, a little more frantic with every
page I turn. It’s last night, I’m watching a
movie on Netflix with Ken. We’ve seen
only 20 minutes but already the ominous
arc of story-line suggests itself. The stars
in that night sky, too, are over-bright, but
the characters in the movie don’t consider
looking up. My one foot in front of the
other keeps me watching them, even
though I’m frightened, in the same way
that I keep eating the tasteless food I
chew, the cereal in its yogurt in its spoon,
bite after bite. I sit in my grandmother’s
lap, looking for a way out of the moment,
nearly seeing where its edge is fraying.
And I’m looking in, through that frayed
edge, at the girl in her grandmother’s lap,
seeing her with the eyes I have now,
which have always been my eyes. Those
eyes are here watching me from just
outside this instant’s fraying edge, they
see how much hill I have left to walk in
the dark.