This month’s featured poet is Bill Morgan who has lived in Normal for nearly 40 of his 68 years. He is Professor emeritus of English at ISU and co-produces WGLT’s Poetry Radio. September Coming On (published here for the first time) arises out of his daily bicycle rides on the Constitution Trail. He’s a fan of the wild cherries that bloom and fruit all along the wooded edges of the Trail.
His prose-poem Sugar Creek celebrates the valiant little stream that runs through Bloomington-Normal and that survives and fosters a variety of life, despite all the dreadful things we do to it. The poem appears in his collection of Central Illinois poems, Sky With Six Geese (Columbus: Pudding House Press, 2005), available from the publisher at www.puddinghouse.com or from Babbitt’s Books in uptown Normal.
September Coming On
Harder now to find the shiny black ones
among the cherries, wrinkled and purple-grey,
dotting the leafy arch of the bicycle trail.
And somebody keeps on turning up
the volume in the right ear—
face it: you’re running out of chances.
Left one steady—live as if the body’s
joys and appetites are yours forever;
anything else, you’re dead already.
So stop; look up and take the good ones—eat:
these small, wild fruits are autumn-plump, firm—
and sweet as peaches steeped in Burgundy.
Bill Morgan
Sugar Creek
It rises up where three small ditches conspire at the eastern edge of town—or so say the European map makers, who must have named the sandy runlet they found beside a maple grove and pushed their label back upstream to a vanishing point they called origin—then makes a run for it: self-possessed, steady, determined. It slides calmly through town and away to a destiny somewhere south and west, following an imperceptible slope of the land that draws it downward past Hanson’s Cleaners, Meineke Mufflers, and Verlo Mattress Factory—all stationed like prison guards on the steep, eroded banks. It rolls quietly through suburban scrub and city decay towards a fulfillment known the way a salmon knows his mandate for the gravel bed that bore him. Hearing as yet no hearkening salt or sea, Sugar Creek murmurs just this: I hunger to be where I am not.
Town planners have rigid ideas about stream deportment and have tried to enforce a concrete discipline through most of town; but Sugar Creek laughs at the slabs, dives under and breaks them or lays down silt, marsh grass, and crawdads on top. Where city crews plant spruces along the banks, the creek sends up assassins from below, soaks the roots, and slowly kills them off. Cypress, willow, and river birch it welcomes and nurtures—along with kingfishers, mallards, herons, muskrats, beavers, and a mink who hunts minnows at the corner by GE Park. Sugar Creek sings: I am a wild one; let no thing not born of water approach me.
West of town, out of its concrete chute, it gathers bulk, collects offerings from a dozen nameless runoffs, hauls away the silt and Round-Up from miles of farm country, gains a West and a Middle fork some 10 miles out, meanders southward, consumes Timber and Prairie Creeks, skirts the south side of each new moraine—until it agrees to share a bed with Salt Creek driving up from the Southeast and the two of them merge for the rush to the final apotheosis. At the 60-mile mark, together they plunge into the Sangamon, uttering little hosannas and extinguishing themselves in the greater stream that—40 miles and three counties later--slips into the Illinois at Beardstown for the journey south to Grafton, the Mississippi, and the Gulf. For this and none other, says Sugar Creek, the land and sky made me.
Bill Morgan