Karen Morris
Our featured poet today is especially appropriate for these pages. A psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan and Honesdale, PA., Karen Morris specializes in the integration of poetics with clinical work and ethical concerns and has published several papers on this topic in the Psychoanalytic Review. Her paper, “Torture and Attachment: Conscience and the Analyst’s World-Seeing Eye,” received the Gradiva Award in 2010 from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis for the best published paper to integrate the arts with psychoanalysis and public education.
Karen Morris’ poems have been published by the National Association for Poetry
Therapy and Celebrating Women’s Voices. She has also given workshops in various psychoanalytic forums on such topics as countertransference processing and waka, the Japanese Court poetry of the 6th-16th centuries.
I’m sure you will find much to interest you in the language and imagery of the three Karen Morris poems below.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
On Wanting to Know Why Some Restaurants Serve Duck Tongue
Because for things smaller than a human head
the world is a mine field of reversible surfaces
where thousand-eyed spies unearth the safely hidden.
Because a jar resembles a floating world,
and pond weeds a metropolis, with insects enough
for small tongues to make quick work of.
Because their last taste was of some long remembered wildness,
and when agape in the grace of your own final waddle you fell,
tasting the clover air with your whole body, a tongue,
yours was only slightly larger than theirs.
Pickled duck tongue with peppercorns.
Pickled duck tongue in green tea soaked rice.
Duck tongue with pesto sauce on dry noodles.
Each morning your face resurfaces in the silvered lake of the mirror.
There are hundreds of you to greet through dry, beady-eyes.
Across the spongy rifts of your mouth drift the morning’s soft sputterings,
the wild locutions of your true self, split the ruined air─
“Open wide,” begs the mirror.
Quack quack quack
says the tongue.
Ikebana For the Artistically Inclined
They slope gently, to the left by a degree or two,
lift trim heads when wowed by the sky,
the shape-shifting of clouds─
drop their jaws at the flash of surfaces, ignoring depth,
and lilt in incantation out of the right side of their faces
when moved so by beauty.
Their eye-brows twitch in delight at such things
like ants signaling toward a sugar bowl.
But in the 50’s, the soul of our nation
shone quizzically toward the east─
Art meant learning to paint, and bowing to the TV
before lessons in sumi-e on how to load and hold a brush−
to paint bamboo leaves in every kind of weather−
in slashing, wind-driven rain and mists.
The teacher, Larry-san, of the whispery voice,
bowed deeply back to us, his hands folded softly
into the uncomprehensible sleeves of his black and white yukata.
I had never imagined such gentleness.
Junko unwraps the bundle of cherry blossoms from the morning paper,
the sun and the wind still bright and blowing through each shimmering petal.
She holds the branches high for inspection─ first step, edaharai,
selection of branches. She says, “Moribana, 3 branch, nature flower,”
and suggests I choose arched boughs, not straight,
to fit the concept of beauty and grace, her face willowy and unchanging
as she traces the air along arcs and curves
that I can not for the life of me see.
I stare into spaces where art should be−
where clustered mounds of cherries assert fullness
she points with the tips of her shears and intones
the mantra of all masters, “too much, take away.”
In gusts of pink, petals fall, regardless, onto the table─
the boughs as if in March wind, emptying, petal by pink petal
into pink mash,─ a whole season waxed upon the room.
And I alone in my one refusal
to be so artistically inclined, do nothing−
but watch, and wait, and cry−
for the everything
that is too much
that I can not take away.
Therapy Ikebana
She wakes each morning
and wonders about worth.
First thought─ worst thought, she adds─
Am I worth it?
She tallies up the length of her limbs
times her jet-black hair, her olive skin─
divides by profiles, multiplies angles,
adds another two points, then subtracts─
zero sum.
You long-stem beauty in a shallow container,
floating island in a rose bowl─
mathematics is no match
for crystalline faith─
leaning is encouraged.
Your face is a world
on the brink of releasing its first cloud.
Your beauty, at first breath,
is beyond any calculus.