W. Scott Olsen is turning over the editorship of Ascent magazine after 25 years, and goes out with a special issue, including some compelling work from mainly American writers. I was a colleague of Scott at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, when he took over Ascent, already established for forty years or more, and moved it from Chicago.
Here are my three poems from the issue, all rather starry eyed, with links to the rest of the issue.
Stardust
I met a woman who said she stole
her father’s ashes from her mother’s home
spread them under her father’s microscope and saw
phosphorus constellations
shining.
Event Horizon
Does anything momentous happen
in the moment everything changes,
when a falling body crosses the line
between light and dark?
In the moment everything changes
is it an event at all
between light and dark?
Like the instant in debate
(is it an event at all?)
when you realize what you’ve said
– this instant in debate –
is fatal to your cause.
When you realize what you’ve said
and all your good reasons are past recall,
it’s fatal to your cause.
Or like one of those days
when all your good reasons are past recall
and nothing seems to happen.
Or like one of those days
you later see as the decisive moment
when nothing seems to happen
as a falling body crosses the line.
Later you see it’s the decisive moment,
the moment everything happens.
Broken Windows
(poem ending with a line by Louise Glück)
Shattered glass. And within each shard
a whole world of street and sky.
My mother laughs.
My father smokes.
Outside the house, with the slam of a door,
life begins.
On winter nights Orion chases across the sky.
Rigel, Betelgeuse. What’s the other?
The walk back from the bar alone is proof
the universe is expanding.
Leaves fall, then snow.
You want to know if there’s Christmas on other planets.
And if love is the answer.
Who said anything sillier, or better?
Find solace in that. Or in the poet’s words,
“the great plates invisibly shifting and changing.”
grandfather, Elder Squire Morton. An itinerant lay preacher, Squire ranged widely on his twice-yearly missionary trips, between Niagara in the west and Oshawa in the east, and he gave a corner of his farm for the first Methodist (“Christian”) church in his community. His grave marker in Unionville cemetery quotes New Testament scripture about having “fought the good fight” and continues with ever smaller, more cramped and illegible scripture, indicative perhaps of the sermons the elder gave in kitchens, school rooms, and on hillsides “from Sharon north to the lake.”
A breaking point came in 1676 with what is known as King Phillip’s War. The war ended terribly for King Phillip, the Wampanoag chief who tried to take back the land he had sold. Many died in the fighting, and more from disease or starvation after being driven out of their villages. The rest were taken in and absorbed by neighboring tribes. English settlers suffered badly too: in proportion in the population, King Phillip’s War was more devastating than the Civil War two centuries later. A third of English towns and villages were destroyed or abandoned, including Groton, Massachusetts, where two of my ancestors (John Nutting and his son John) were killed, and another (Major Simon Willard) led the militia that raised the siege of the town. In the kind of collective punishment that I decried when practised against Sitting Bull’s Lakota in my bo
ok The Hundred Cuts, the Wampanoag and their allies attacked English farms at random, including the home of my ancestor Thomas Eames, who left an itemized account of every lamb, wagon, blanket and sack of corn he lost, beginning with “a wife and nine children.” The compensation awarded him by the colonial government after the war was “200 acres near to Mount Waite,” a fair description of where King Phillip’s home village had been located, the last piece of land he did not sell.
Colin Morton 