Editor’s note: Every month GT features the poems of a local poet. This month we highlight the work of Morton Marcus, a Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year in 1999. He is also one of this year’s Gail Rich Award winners, He is the author of 10 books of poetry and one novel. His poems have appeared in hundreds of literary journals and more than 85 anthologies. His memoirs will come out this October, and this month he will read from his just-published book of prose poems, “Pursuing the Dream Bone,” at 7:30 p.m. on June 28 at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Admission is free. The following are a selection of poems from “Pursuing the Dream Bone.” THE MISTAKE In 1954, I took part in a war in Asia. In 1968, I marched against one being waged on the same continent. In 1996, I visited a country in eastern Europe so ravaged by war it resembled an animal’s ripped pelt. The killings in all three wars had gone beyond the battlefields—women, children, young and old were raped, tortured, mutilated, their bodies thrown into piles and covered with the earth they lived on, fought over, would become. In none of those places did I think the earth was mine. That was the difference. That was the mistake. LISTENING This is what we hear: the rustling of newspapers near the easy chair, the shuffling of slippers near the bed, birdsong beyond the window. But these are nothing like those moments when I truly listen and am deluged by the inner decibels of things—the chiming jewels hung from every note of birdsong, the tap of the beetle’s step, and the tulip on the back porch unwrapping its petals like schooner sails snapping in the wind.
For several minutes each day I listen for those sounds, and sometimes I’m sure I can detect twitterings in the distance, and screeches, chimes, groans—all the sounds of the world like laden goods approaching on the decks of innumerable square-rigged cargo ships that every moment are plunging toward the harbors of ours ears.
LAUGHTER Of all the secrets Eduardo Galeano knows, this is the best: “‘The important thing is to laugh… and to laugh together.’”
He was told this by Jose Luis Castro, a carpenter, who heard it from his father, a man who made everyone laugh with his tall tales and love of life.
The old man knew that the one who laughs alone laughs at his wife and neighbor, at the child who scrapes his knee in the gutter; laughs at the worker demonstrating for a better life and the banker suffering from toothache; laughs equally at the man with a country and the man without one, at the dwarf, the stutterer, the hemophiliac. For he is the one expunged from the Bible, who laughed in the Garden to see God on his knees breathing the breath of life into the clay figure.
WHERE ARE THEIR CHILDREN? A boy falls from a ladder propped against the barn. What happens to the sons and daughters he never had?
A bachelor is taken hostage and shot; a teenage girl raped and strangled. Where are their children?
I sometimes think I was never born: my great-grandfather, a boy, one of the numberless people butchered in a nineteenth century pogrom; my great-great grandmother, a girl of ten, buried under the debris of an eighteenth century Balkan earthquake.
Then whose hand has written this page? Whose voices speak from the silence of books and make the bones of children flutter in unmarked graves?
THOSE LITTLE LOST THINGS
The dead are everywhere among us. They snap off buttons, steal socks and handkerchiefs from the washing machine, earrings and collar stays from the dresser — mementoes to remember us by on the journey they always return from to pick up ribbons or keys, things they’ve forgotten or never realized they were so fond of.
It’s not thievery, really. They just can’t communicate to us that they’re taking this or that, so we blame wives or children or pets for anything missing, until we look at the wash line in the backyard and see the dead jigging in our hand-me-down clothes, or searching in a pocket for a note they’ve misplaced or a letter they have suddenly, urgently, uselessly remembered.
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