Marc Harshman
Folio for a Morning With Thunderstorm and Squirrels
The bitter tea is almost enough to suffice
for a dose of reality.
Somewhere someone is playing a saw, its sweet melancholy
hesitating on a flight of stairs long enough
to become perfection itself.
I’ve issued an invitation to two squirrels to come into my studio,
have cranked open the window, hinted there is a cache
of butternuts I’m willing to share.
Religion grows in the crevices
where tears and senseless good fortune mingle.
Sometimes sour-grass, sometimes a single violet
arise as testament.
An avian choir has assembled
under the dripping eaves of the morning storm.
Somewhere in the basement the plumbing provides
accompaniment for them, for me.
Serendipity remains the most important linguistic contribution
to my life since 1969.
Far off the bellows in a lab of forgotten meteorologists are working
at the embers of mystery:
I hear their moans, I see
them light the sky
with an arcane foolscap of light.
I like to think an hourglass is a sentient being that, stood before me,
is witness to both gravitas and whimsy:
what’s gone is gone
and what’s lost
can be turned
on its head
if not now, well, then . . .
And sometimes that ellipsis simply represents
the circle around which
I meet myself coming in from the rain
to a happy house
filled with squirrels and birdsong,
with carpenters and music
and a kind of cryptic lighting
with which I see, ancient
as the first birthday of time,
the truth of everything.
and begin then to think
the playwright of this world
didn’t do as badly as I’d thought.
Yes, there’s the butcher’s bill to be paid but
I have an hourglass
and know how to use it.
~
Dedication
To be sure, it was a holy ceremony
with redwoods, rocks, and a sprinkling
of Latin from a concordance of fools,
after which the baby sprouted,
and began to thrive,
spreading its roots and opening windows
every time we blinked.
Mother slept through it all.
Taxis barked below with their horns.
The parade departed hours ago
marching south with live ammo.
We became fixated on this
news reel from beyond,
and worried.
Look: the dinosaurs fighting their way
through the blizzards,
the plastic cave men lifting their little sticks,
the distant factories of the sun
pounding hydrogen into helium.
Still, the Red Sea was again rolled back like a carpet
worth more gold than any army of men.
And, although there are spooks winking at us from within the byzantine
warren of our suburb’s familiar streets,
double agents who know and carry our future toward us,
they do so without rancor or judgment.
And then there’s this new god, at play in the crib of chrysanthemums,
testing each word before blossoming.
It seems it may yet work out.
The windows are all open now.
And despite our exhaustion—entertaining
this little scamp has been real work—
we intend to soon lay down our fiddles and drums,
and hope we, too, will get to dance
over Bergman’s black and white mountain, as we smell the hay,
listen to the birds,
feel that kiss
on our cheek
like a baby’s breath.
Harshman’s collections of poetry include Green-Silver and Silent [Bottom Dog], Woman in Red Anorak [Lynx House], winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, Believe What You Can [WVU], winner of the Weatherford Award, Following the Silence [Press 53] and Dispatch from the Mountain State from WVU Press in 2025. He was named Appalachian Heritage Writer for 2024 by Shepherd University. He is also the author of fourteen nationally acclaimed children’s books including The Storm, a Smithsonian Notable Book.
