Poetry by Cecil Morris
On this January day the sky opens wide and bright,
a dream of blue realized and guileless, and the lake,
thanks to a December of bountiful rain and snow,
looks again like a lake where a teenage boy might water ski
through the sear of August and right into the start of school.
My best friend and I take turns throwing a tennis ball
for his galloping Labrador retriever that chases
every arc and leaps into the risen water with a joy
inexhaustible as the sky. She hardly needs a name,
this year-old eagerness, this incarnation of galumphing.
I watch her mad rush and think of Sisyphus. Maybe he loved
the boulder, the reassuring weight of it, the thunder
of its roll. I see rapture in her eyes, her open mouth,
the pink expectation of her tongue, the whole body shake
and spray of water flung off: a little galaxy
of love, of canine glee, of heart in orbit tight,
around and around a simple repetition.
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing or forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere.
