Friday, January 24, 2020

The Nightstand. By Bruce Morton


He stands there still
Framed next to the bed,
Tarnished, chipped gilt,
Where nightmares wept
And sleep sometimes slept.


Echoes sound distant
In the penumbra
Of cheap whiskey
Of family history
Of filial mystery.


The tight-jawed visage
Of grandfatherly sobriety
Glaring, daring memory.
My father, the son
Would carry him drunk,
The body dead weight,
Upstairs to his nightstand
To fend and sleep 
Off his Irish demons, 
Transfigured wholly 
Into the ghost of himself.


There it is, the faith
Of our fathers, who each,
In his own turn, was a son.
Such is the irony of agony--
The tragedy of progeny.                     


And here I am
In the middle of the night
Seeking some dark insight
To gauge their and my rage,
Taking my night stand
Writing a sober poem.




Bruce Morton splits his time between Bozeman, Montana and Buckeye, Arizona. His volume of poems, Simple Arithmetic and Other Artifices, was published in 2015. His poetry has appeared in various anthologies and magazines including Kansas Quarterly, Connecticut Quarterly, Spoon River Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, North Stone Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and San Pedro River Review.


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