The Friend – Paul Morett
July 14, 2026
Forgetful Angel
Torn-almost-meek-and-triply-
(I’d offered him the fourth, he was so pretty),
He showed me all the gardens where he ginned
That careful, lovely self, his meed of pity.
The roses waved: oh, all their easeless grace
Was nothing but one glossing of his mood!
And once the subjugations left his face,
I think no slave of Jesus could have stood
Indifferent! —Now with silver lips he scours
My closest soul, and all my tilted eyes:
I think he kisses out of them the hours,
I think with every kiss some science dies.
We love until experience has dropped,
And mute-in-pardon, let our heads be cropped.
Florida
My bones are timid now. It gently rains
Where formerly she held me still and pressed,
Like white feathers to my sunken chest
The flawless hearts of all the hurricanes.
The humid bells of all-annealing dawn,
The true windows that, transient as cranes,
Soared through me once, now, crossing, tremble on
Toward spongy, ageless trees and windowpanes
More vicious. Mirrors!––help me, honest fears,
You covering angels, how can I atone
If banyan-like you’ve brought down all your spears
And stuck them here between my every bone?
The fine dark roots that dig inside me there
Are animated from her knots of hair.
Père-Lachaise
The curls they crawl from might just be an adder’s
Teeth, and down my forehead, down my face,
They carry their accretions in a race
Of raindrops, and they say that nothing matters:
When down and off my chin, each pitter-patters
Among the herbs of sweet and verdant space
It leaves behind, in acid or in base,
A smooth or roughened track, its chutes or ladders.
Thus I’ve seen Christs grow shaggy as the tongues
In smoking PSAs, with angels gnawed
To lumps on either side, like failing lungs:
Yet as I swell/erode, the breath of God
In gasping seems to catch on stronger songs
And words that go for much, unless you’re flawed.
McGuires
I get my you’s and me’s mixed up sometimes.
I think you might have two moles shaped like tears,
I feel I might have slightly bigger ears:
But though I’ve written dense mnemonic rhymes,
For me the devil’s spear is one with Michael’s,
Both count two points…? the harp Apollo played
And the pipes of that poor satyr that he flayed
Might well be two fat twins on motorcycles.
I said poor satyr! But will someone flense
From my red heart the you that like a blubber
Deforms it; peel from my true mind the cover
Of you-ness there that makes it slow and dense?
The crowd waves and the fire engine toots.
We two chuff by in strengthened cowboy boots.
Cheops
My soul dreams sugar cubes of eyes like bricks
As baked inside there’s still some siphoned sun
And golden straws I portion one by one
To whinny-whimpers, gnashings, awful tics:
Behind, a clot of tears it sometimes licks
That make it apt to slash and shriek and run
Down halls whose burned-out lamps it seems to shun;
Its blood drips bright and black like oil slicks.
The stones my eyes are thin from all the gnawing;
There pours in sweetly on my suffering head
As if the pillaged cap of me were thawing
A stream of gold that makes my world go red;
And I remember all the sound of sawing,
The hands of slaves and stink of riverbed.