Alastair Morrison

Love Poem with Theme from Heraclitus

The way a memory engrafts itself
to features of a landscape;
your hair, and your scalp. 

A canal, certain
streets of marble. Fixed
courses, immutable 

pull; still
one could have been elsewhere.
The surety is an effect 

of where it happened
to happen. Throb of the waterway,
your hair, your neck, 

the courses of the droplets
on your skin, so given, and gone.
In your white dress, 

step back into that canal.
If there is ever any same canal.
If there is ever any stepping out.

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Alastair Morrison is a physician and psychiatry resident in Hamilton, Ontario. His recent critical work appears in A Poetic Language of Aging (Bloomsbury, 2023) and the Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry (Routledge, 2023). His recent poems appear in Canadian Literature, The Literary Review of Canada, Red Ogre Review and elsewhere.