Where Land Meets Sky

“Where Land Meets Sky”
for Elemore Morgan Jr. By Darrell Bourque

He loves this place he’s fallen into:

his skies of smeared lilac, his clouds spun
by muscled ether, congealed air so newly blue
it’s hard to tell it from the sky we knew once
and loved so. After shot-silk sky, what else?
All the earth and all that’s creatured in it. Tongues
of irises from the swamps, big lazy trees, bells
on boats in creeping rivers and cows like peace
flags grazing in the prairies, or lying in wells
of cow dreams making milk. He loves the creases
and the blur: stalks filled with rice to falling,
water rushing from pipes, and a leaf in wind. Leases
on anything that takes us to the places these converge,
a line in all we see and know, oh holy curve and surge.


(from the 2005 collection of poems The Blue Boat. Bourque is the Louisiana Poet Laureate.)
“Vertical View” by Elemore Morgan Jr., 2008, acrylic on masonite