Mary Moore
(USA)
What Angst Says
That ache like bone spurs worrying
your shoulder blades may bode
a wing-span like Michelangelo’s
muscular angels,
or a backpack of guilt
like the crone’s hump
in “Hansel and Gretel.”
That tingling in
your feet—un-danced
fandangos or the urge
to sleep, feet resting
on the ottoman’s leathery back.
What twitches
under your eye? A mole-to-be,
or the spot where a new sense
will emerge, like the eye-
shaped stain on a moth’s
light-colored wing?
The noise of thinking
you can hear the haze drowse
on the vineyard or the sizzle
of burning hedges like bridges
stings, spurs and urges you
onward. Even the elms
are abuzz with expectation.
Sepia
The creek, mud-brown, knuckles
its way over logs and stones, buckling
over slate. It gouged metal foil
says water is not a soul.
But air’s clarity has dominion
in these leafless deciduous woods. You can even
come to love the Eighteenth-Century sepia-
print look—paper-white sky, woods beige,
the interstices between the stones dull
umber worn by water’s vow to null
even stone. Even the mine’s shut mouth
is drowned brown. Is it the stones, the shadow arteries
of the trees, or earth itself that weeps sepia?
In the Tenth Year of the Afghan War
1
An orchard of masts and the colors
they’re painted in––cobalt,
bright white––and the brown
greens of hills,
rough-edged, pine-bristled, fir-sown––
beyond.
The harbor is green and the water flat.
The reflections are likewise.
The white masts fly ropes and ghosts
of ropes, rolled tri-
and fore- sails, air’s blue
flags. There’s faint music:
the metal fittings bell
softly with the swell.
A man greets a guest, “Ahoy.”
Joke or a boast?
2
Like the boats suited
to light’s glint and flick, the dazzle
of forms fit precisely
for their duties, we lie side by side,
somnolent, your hips a boy’s,
your hair a red blond halo.
Not sainted, martyred
or married, as Saint
Paul would have it, joyful
teacher and thinker
of thinkers, you sow neither
children nor tears.
3
In this, the tenth year
of the Afghan war,
the booms and horns of late afternoon
yacht races: you wake
to that luck, maneuver
back up through dreams.
Bars of light and shade
the blinds shed louver
one arm. Our moods are attuned
to twos: light and shade, on, off, this, that
me, you. You cannot sleep, you say,
and I inhabiting the world where
you just woke up
will not disrupt
the tissue of dream in which
you have not dreamed,
in which the room and me,
the marina beside the green harbor,
agree to these seams,
ours and the world’s––
waking, sleeping, here, there, breath
death––so loosely sutured.
4
On the ferry, the cargo ships
dwarf us. Red, blue, and green
boxes, house-sized, ride
in stacks impossibly high on
each slow hulk. Two miniscule
kayakers go by, one blue-coated
seed to each fragile husk.
A yacht sails by, miniaturized
against the black hull,
sails full, bowed, in that ancient
imitation of flying
crescent moons.
5
The yachts lay white masts on the water.
The barely moving swell
wrinkles the lines like print-outs
of heart-beats, voices.
Each oscillation records another
inkling of the mystery––fear, desire,
breath, death, another hesitation
under fire, a fatal pause.
But the masts cease
creasing and beating at night
and the lights that necklace
the harbor come on, mirrored
on the almost immoveable.
Each reflected star morphs,
points, narrows. The harbor
wears a necklace of swords.
Reading the Writing on the Sky
Luminous jets trails criss-cross the view,
a chalk of exhaust
now that all looking’s a risk—a seeing
whether-or-not, an innocence exposed
like Mary’s blue eyes in Giotto.
Traces of witness—
as if to regard is to guard
against night-terrors, sweats, to secure
our icons from fear.
I imagine their eyes sky-blue, pilots’
I mean, like my father’s, clear and guileless
in his Air Force photo.
But once secured, the sky is no longer free.
Not quite the evidence of deity
the heaven I want—
intentless, all space and innocence.
I walk the dog in the woods trusting
the ordinary day. When we stop,
the dog looks up at trees.
His eyes, light-spattered
like wet brown leaves, so open
they’re empty, receive and receive.
My looking washes the sky
with the blue of wishes.
Through the trees the jet trails enlarge,
expand and dissolve, white
as the whites of our eyes.
The Weather of Longing
Woke to wind’s tug of war with weeds on the slope;
ragged blues, steeples pointing at sky,
hayfields tugged uphill. Bits of sky flew
through my mother’s cloud-white fly-away
hair. She smelled of ozone and flint
in the dream. On the curb, light-fringed like a door,
like all thresholds and portals, she stands. After
eighty years of crossword and whiskey, she goes
where fire goes when it’s out. She loosens flight
from the bow of her spine, and follows
my father, the arrow. I love her wholly
and without question now she is feathered
with longing, going out in its weather.
____________________________________________
My work is forthcoming in Unsplendid, Cider Press Review, and Nimrod, and has appeared most recently in Drunken Boat, Birmingham Poetry Review No 41, and in its 25th Anniversary Issue, Santa Fe Review, Nimrod’s 2011 Awards Issue (finalist), Sow’s Ear Review (finalist in 2012 contest) , 10 x 3, Connotation Press (January 2013), Evolutionary Review, Cavalier Literary Couture, American Poetry Journal, 2riverview, Prairie Schooner. Earlier credits include Kestrel, Sow’s Ear Review, Poetry, Field, New Letters (awards issue), Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Negative Capability and more. My first collection, The Book of Snow, was published by Cleveland State University in 1997.
I teach Renaissance literature with an emphasis on gender issues and poetry at Marshall University in West Virginia.