Poetry from The Literary Review



Quo Journal: Cardinalized

MICHAEL MORSE


Up in the morning and the scenery all Dutch
and what not—wind, gray cloud, scrim of
kept pigeons flying so tight in their loops
that they speak the language of kites as
they dip and zag on invisible lines—it's
the kept that fly so free and reel themselves in
when flag and dovecote call. Everything else—
the harbor, the boats, the whitecaps, the sky
out east where a little sun fights through—is what not.
When I wake up feeling like Quo it's as if
I release birds to the sky and reel them back
when they've had a taste of blue, of control.
I want the blue and my little box of kept birds.

I was asking Saint Matthew this morning about
how to proceed with someone new, because
the sky's blue for a bit before history comes in,
pulls a third chair up to your candlelit deuce
and gives the company you keep the sound of wings
unkempt, the pulleys and levers and strings of flight.
I'd rather not wake up feeling Dutch all over and say
I am but a feather or You don't close the barn door after the horse is gone.
Quo peels an orange and puts the pieces on his plate.
The orange on black is a still life he calls oriole
because history is winged and has a fast heart.
I'm thinking of religious men who need to pick and choose.
What does it take? A raven on the piazza
sounding off for Umbria's favorite son?
The way the Venetian carries himself in public?
How purple robes might drape the knees of the Pole?
The table of cardinals will make a black smoke
when theirs is a mind gone chimney:
a robe for the air to defrock and unthread.

I do not know what I carry but there's a cardinal
in my throat wrapped in silk, a voice
so beautiful and pained it might hush a church.
You ministers, who preside and choose,
I need a tutorial, I want to sit on the steps
of the piazza and let the kept bird out—
watch the what not turn what if,
the bird out of the throat gaining air, getting voice.
The chapel full of Cardinals wants its windows.
As they ponder their way towards white smoke,
what if they see wingflash flame the glass
leaving sky a little burnt in its wake;
what if they see their namesake?
What if the men in robes see themselves
in flight for a moment and like how it feels?
What if they went there?