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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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J. Morris

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Soon enough

Whenever I’m published, I add the magazine
to my master set on the living-room shelf,
and put additional copies in a drawer,
leaving out an extra one
to take to my father. His “office” is neat, narrow.
I consider it a place for him to get
away from Mom. How much work
can he really do at seventy-eight?

I hand it over. I wish he’d dwell a bit,
heft, sniff this visible sign
of invisible grace: the perfect-bound six-by-nine
evidence that I’m not a fool.
It does please him, briefly. He finds me there
in the T of C, and looks me up,
and strokes our surname. Eyes beam
at me bifocally. Innocent

questions - No luck with The New Yorker yet?
and So when will the novel be finished?
and Did they pay you anything for this? -
don’t mean to him what they do to me,
I suppose. And I truly doubt that he intends
to be competitive when he sets
the Whatever Review aside and tells me
that yet another to-the-editor

letter of his has been published. Quite the silver
typewriter Pop commands in his dotage.
He tucks my typeset words away to carry
home and place - where? Not
on the bookshelf in the living room; I’ve looked,
thinking, They’ll be coming back.
His cache of my Complete Works
will soon enough become a set

of extra copies. Soon enough.

 

Page(s) 30-31

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