At Work in the Garden of Possibilities

poems by

Cecil Morris

~100 pages, $16 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: May/June 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $9.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $14/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Cecil Morris taught high school English for 37 years in the small northern California city where he grew up (and attended the same public schools). At Work in the Garden of Possibilities is his debut poetry collection. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Morris has poems in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, Lascaux Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere. He and his partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between their hometown and the cool Oregon coast, where they walk the beach and marvel at the sea and tide pools and joyful romping dogs.

Cecil Morris evokes the bittersweet bonds between teacher and student as each learns from the other, explores with superb particularity and wry wit those questions that can’t be answered in one class period or life and “the surge and swell of crossing from innocence to what comes next.” We should all be so lucky to be At Work in the Garden of Possibilities. You owe yourself the wonders within these pages. ~ Gary Thomas, O Yes We Breathe

The poems At Work in the Garden of Possibilities by Cecil Morris are lyrical. They dance with metaphor about a life in teaching. His poetic landscape of classroom life is a vibrant with honesty. At once tender and true to what we all have experienced, whether teacher or student, Morris allows us to smell the sweat, see into a land of dreams and reality, and hear the silence of the unseen. He squires us “to the light that lies/in words”. ~Linda Toren, Calaveras Poet Laureate (2022-2024), author of Raven Braids the Wind and Calaveras Poets & Community Sourced Poems, radio host for A Way with Words KQBM community radio.

On My Right

In first period junior English,
in the last seat in the first row,
nearest the door and farthest from me, she sits
with her blue backpack of school books
before her on her small desk,
like the great wall,
like the great barrier reef,
like her indifference solidified.
With her loose blonde hair spilling
over her shoulders and
along her quiet face
with its pale lips and small nose,
with its blue eyes looking down always,
with all that and with her stillness,
with the way she sits all period
without moving or fidgeting
without talking, she lulls me
into overlooking her,
into forgetting the life which must live
inside her blonde head too deep
for my books or poems to reach.
Until one dreary December day,
in a poem she let her secret slip
like a long-held breath exhaled.
After that breathy whisper breathed to me
in ragged verses on binder paper,
after that I could not take my eyes
from her, could not forget the voice
inside her silence, could not forget the life
behind the indifference she wore
to school each day.

 The Cowboy in English

I watch him not reading,
shifting in his seat,
uneasy as the horse in the chute,
and I wonder what I have to offer him.
He takes off his cowboy hat,
picks lint from its heavy black felt,
and then settles it on his matted hair.
He leans back in his seat, whip-thin
but tough, too, tough enough
that no one laughs at his tooled belt
or his wide rodeo buckle.

I watch his heavy-knuckled hand
slide his book across his desk,
watch him press his few words into his paper,
watch him watch the thin strip of sky
visible through the room’s narrow windows,
and I know all that matters to him is outside—
the sharp bite of the January air,
the smell of dust and saddle leather,
the heat that rises from his horse
after he makes it lope around
and around his father’s field.

I want to give him something he can use
when he no longer wants to take the fall,
when he’s broken his last thin bone,
when his body finally betrays him,
or worse, when his spirit fails.
I want to give him something easier
than hard landings on hoof-packed dirt,
than lessons taught by the huge
sweating bulls of his experience.

Stages

The smartest boy who did not graduate
didn’t come to class or do assignments
even though he said he could have
done them all and should be passed.

Three days from graduation he planted
himself by my desk and said he did enough
to show he deserved to walk the stage,
but I said no, no, potential’s not enough.

He looked at me, his dark eyes dark to me,
his heavy arms dropping heavy on my desk,
and told me he’d passed everything else,
but I said no, no, history’s not enough.

But, he said, his hands folding into fists,
my dad is coming out from Texas to watch
me walk. My life’s been hard, he said, unfair.
But I said no. Sympathy’s not enough.

You had to do the work, I said, these last
ten weeks, had to earn those final points,
can not get them as a gift. And when he
held his tears and kept his angry curses

and unrolled his fist to shake my hand,
I knew that he had crossed a bigger stage
than the one assembled on the football field,
the one he would not walk with all his friends.

Anchor and Beacon

I wear a jacket I bought sixteen years ago
for visibility on a school field trip—
a blazing lifeguard red, a stop sign students
could spot from a distance in a crowd, both beacon
and warning, so none of us would be lost
or caught out. My wife says that I should retire it,
that it makes me look like a lost fire hydrant
or five-alarm blaze from far away. I tell her
it has deep pockets and an easy zipper
and lets me carry with myself, wrap around myself
indeed, my last moments of apparent usefulness—
the last living veteran of dimly recalled wars
festooned in uniform and medals, vestiges
of glories past. So, I can fool myself and look
the fool, according to my wife. I am, after all,
as are we all, the sum of memories stored,
replayed, perhaps, spliced and edited with the skill
that comes with age. So many recollections pass
like extras in a crowd scene behind the star,
their clothes landscape bland, the shades of concrete
or distant trees in mottled hues, degrees of green
and brown, a blend of beige and shadow, mere fillers.
This red jacket says I am in a world that says,
at best, so what, and, at worst, still here, a world
that has begun to erase me from the past
like an embarrassment and wall off the future
with the orange traffic cones of music and stars
I don’t know. I am lost in a foreign land.
So I keep the red jacket and wonder where
those students have wandered now and if any
of them still hear my voice reading poems to them
in the stale air of the classroom at the top
of the stairs, my voice in their heads guiding them.