The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: George Moore
Coffee for the poorGeorge Moore is a poet of landscapes, whether within or without, and his poems move seamlessly, and beautifully, between them. “At Skibbereen,” amid “Kerry cows” and “ancient vines,” he considers: This late sympathy with the slowness of life,His road leads not to tourism, but to places he inhales and knows, to which he brings an empathic pen, such as, in our changing world, the sight of a struggling, dispossessed polar bear in “The Swim to Iceland.” Moore’s poems often arise from the places he has worked and traveled, as well as from his stays at writer’s residencies in Iceland, Portugal, and Spain, as well as on the island of Paros, Greece, where he met his wife, a Canadian poet. And what poems they are: From a boat to Mexico's Isla Mujerés, uniformed schoolgirls suggest “a rapid succession of smiles / like small whitecaps across the inlet waters . . . .” Moore taught for years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and presently lives with his wife on the south shore of Nova Scotia in a lobster fishing village. He has published widely in journals for many years, including poems in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, Valparaiso, Stand (UK), Orbis (UK), Arc, Fiddlehead, Antigonish Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Dublin Review, The Journal (UK), Grain, Cider Press Review, Chelsea, and, of course, the Innisfree Poetry Journal. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Bailieborough Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize from the Munster Literature Centre. He has also been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Brittingham Poetry Prize, the Anhinga Poetry Prize, the Wolfson and the Rhysling Poetry Awards, and nominated for six Pushcart Prizes, as well as for “Best of the Net” and “Best of the Web” prizes. from Saint Agnes Outside the Walls Café on the Alentejo Coffee for the poor is heart’s blood, the oil that runs the body’s machinery, a dark sun on the crest of an inner landscape at morning’s break point with the sea of the night. Without cafés along the praça where would people congregate outside of churches to talk of the gods in milder manners or peel back the new work day? Without this ebony sea of marrow there’d be trouble in the land of sheep. Without love in this dark drop of blood, the bean of the universe with its broken energies, night rays imagined in the day’s core, hours would pass, surely, but without relief. And in this condensed moment of Alentejo time there would be no tongues of Portuguese, nor the slow crescendoing European, but merely the static echoes of history. Without this demitasse of ardor and amperage, no one would hear the bells as the cattle drop their heads to feed, no one would speak of their poverty, or of their hours, newly blessed, with the mud of the earth in their veins. Waiting Room After all that time, I was out of the room. The breath rose up and evaporated in a black sun. That’s what the poem wants, some kind of immediacy. But then death comes out of nowhere, always. Going going gone. The life I did not see coming, did not see the meaning of, the weight of, escapes even as it has arrived. Now the idea of death is the providence of the poem, the brief conclusion that goes nowhere, yet it cannot quite reach back either. For this man it was no postmodern decay, no great tabooed mania of cells, but only old age, an empty cellar, a phone ringing at the end of an empty hall. He taught me how a doctor views the changes toward death. The hospital cares less. They milk the cattle, no matter how humanitarian the dream. So the poem must become more than what is actually said. This is the room where the poem lives, where he was breathing. This space that does not live and never has, but speaks of living. The poem separates itself and dies on the page. And only the living can revive it. It crawls back into me. He said a hundred times that he was ready to go. That is what he said. The poem is proof we were ready. It does not matter that the room was empty in the end. After years, all this time spent making a single day. The Death of Modernism for Carter, wherever he isThe very last time, in the library, you had thrown your shoes away saying it was spring, you wouldn’t be needing them. The streets safer than before violence brewed on ill-lit screens, and in neighborhood divorces and dark centers of disremembered cities. A game, living, not just the aftercrop of philosophy. In high school, we knew each other indifferently, mad at the edges, wanting something to break through to. Trailing rain, you wandered into the Denver Public Library in ragged sweater and threadbare jeans. I was hunting the history of something for a paper due the next day—the concrete path already darkening with rain— without exoneration. You there at the edge of things, always ready for the next thing in a perpetual day, the wave of the world, for a moment, holding you up, until you slipped out, praising the rain, without a place we could agree on, the library an aquarium, a joke housing the drowned. At Skibbereen At Skibbereen, I run with the cows, a free man. They gather near the slow garden of the sea, crowd the narrow lane down to the next field, always their destination, and brush the gate pressing in toward the grain trough. That there was ever bred a creature like this, burnt chocolate as bog, without a care but to feed, clopping in thunder along the tarmac road, wallowing toward some vague sense of home, even as we do. I rise up past drystone fences, smelling the sea and manure, something in the morning sweet, indiscernible, but not rotted, blooming, transforming the sluggish morning’s reverie. With these Kerry cows, I crest the hill that leads to Roaringwater Bay but cannot run so far, while ancient vines reach out and caress my face. This late sympathy with the slowness of life, no wind, and sun just touching hedgerow, wraps me in the lifting mist, fine as a solitary thought, transient and real, and I turn to descend the road again, remembering. The Swim to Iceland We drive along the coastal road a day or perhaps only a moment after the polar bear lumbered down the same uneven road. Riding the ice from Greenland, floating and swimming, and what was it she was looking for, was she lost or was it some urge to see the edge of the world, as it’s dwindling? Of course, when she arrives she’s shot and killed. This is the new world, after all, island headlands of the Pole, too small and crowded for her kind, too computerized and full of thermal swimming pools. If only the bears could shrink as the polar ice cap does, dissolve into a dew? But like Hamlet they are too physical, too much of this world. White as a flag on this greening coast, white as sky but air alone cannot hide her, and the whiteness now does not stay all summer. The hunt happens almost immediately. She cannot reach the interior. Lost there, she might emerge anywhere into the cities, such as they are, hard miles from the ice fields. One bear, more or less, and death is but a sign of the times. One lumbering mammal up from the frozen sea, stood erect and watched her ice sheet breaking up, before she crossed the aberrant green. The Dogs of Yucatán in memory of José Emilio PachecoThe only way is to get down on your knees and pray among them. They are the community of the streets, and all streets lead to sacrifice, across the great plain of Aztec grief, which is living, the other side of evening. Across the lawns of the Paseo de Montejo, the beasts of the Avenue Reforma gather for the night’s prowl. Crossing cautiously, the pools of water where a clock of silver hangs, five centuries carries them to a temple many have forgotten. The dogs do not bark. They have learned their own sound is an enemy, an onslaught of retribution. Death’s still cheap, and the sleeping kill in their sleep. But the wealthy have moved to other quarters. So the dogs wake to roam the ancient byways, searching for something as yet unknown, something that might sustain them: a scrap of leftover civilization, a token someone dropped on their way to the Underworld, that will lead them back to Creation. Saint Agnes, Outside In a time of love, when the body rests on rose petals, rises from wine baths, or olive oil, and the body is displayed in every hallway, on every marble pedestal, palace step, in every arena, the body perfect in contrapposto, figures loosely draped in himatia, upright as gods, beyond reproach, and all the Roman world lays beyond the gates like a field of lilies, she said no. In a day when sex was not an obligation, faceless in its way, without frenzy or neurosis, when to lie down meant to live, then walk away, born or bruised, but robbed of nothing, when marriage was a situation, and, worse, to make love without payment, outside of slavery, was stupra, disloyalty, dishonor, a law dealing death in its breech, then honor too could be refusal. So a basilica built on her aedicule, built to complete the space between love and sex, where she waited for the Lord to take her out of the brothels, and off the stake, and perform the sacrificial fire into saint, into untouchable, pre- woman beyond the gaze of men, and all at thirteen when it’s said, merely a maid, and the boys as rude as sin, she told the pretty ones to leave her alone, leave her to her high bridal day, her body but a coin in the well of her devotion. Birds of the Alentejo On the high plateau of Portugal, the pigs scrounge out all the grass and bark, bend the small trees down with the weight of their hunger. But the birds go on chattering an Alentejo tick among these other species. Names escaping are of little importance. These are human things: the way we have of feeling not quite alone. The birds speak a different tongue of pure desire. A deeper need to find, to eat, that is not like the pig’s voracity, a hunger of the air. Open to other possibilities, they do not rest on their stomachs. The birds enjoy a singling out of time in the morning hours, a swirl of separateness, trill to low call. But caught in the cacophony, who can eat or sleep? I’m only another listener, but the birds make clear the difference. All that has occurred, all that time consumes, in a moment, disappears. from Children's Drawings of the Universe Boat to Isla Mujerés A flock of pigeons, or osprey, or unknown birds has come to roost on the edge of the wooden barge. But no, they are schoolgirls, dressed in uniforms of some secret place where blue and white are the sacrificial raiment, or all that remains. And then, a rapid succession of smiles like small whitecaps across the inlet waters with its shallows green as malachite in the Winter Palace; and that older memory for a moment holds the boat suspended, the girls at ease, turning now, as if we stood in imperial halls of mallow stone, after the violence of a Russian spring, and Impressionist paintings, stolen after the war, hung in empty rooms. On this barge, a sudden sense of freedom in the obvious contradiction. The boat skirts a small flotilla of garbage that drifts off as a forgotten island, and the girls begin to sing an anthem from some familiar revolution, before their time; and sunlight shows us the bottom of a shallow sea harbored in-between, full of the greens of disconnected worlds, and we are carried, rocking, to the island. Survivor Tactics a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.With the millennia of traditions that create this space you inhabit, as a bear inhabits a cave, or a fish a stream, but with your heightened sense of awareness, that crutch some call consciousness, these environs on the way to heaven are torturously incomplete. It’s not that you want answers, or the answer, as if there were a gold ring on this wheel you are forced to ride, but you want more than a transfer ticket. You want a sense of validation, a reason, a sinecure, but most of all, a space that does not shrink. You want love, perhaps, and/or a few bright children, those fleshy things one leaves behind to tell others which way they have gone. For now that you have found yourself at last alone on the beach at Acapulco, with an umbrella drink in your hand and a sunset that should only be shared, and the warm air curling the hairs on your chest, you don’t feel you deserve such monotony, that somehow you’ve been detoured, misdirected perhaps, and that all you’ve worked for is meant to be enjoyed, isn’t it? You feel like the trajectory of a rocket waiting to fall back down to earth, in the deadly grasp of human gravity, quotidian and inveterate, in fear of the final sum-up and unable even to make the proper face. But think about the doors you have walked by late at night, and the places you could have gone, never to return. Think hard of the one place you could never imagine yourself. Curled in an armchair at home reading an incredible book that you realize only on the last page that you have yourself written, but it ends in a smudged watermark with illegible signature because it has sat in the basement too long gathering mold and disguising the true nature of your choices. And after a short nap, you wake up the survivor, the magician, the god, for you have nothing anymore to go after, and you open the book again, somehow complete. Caduceus The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,My father became invisible after the first injection. It was to quiet him down. His heart had been racing to get through the world, to reach the finish line, perhaps to wake on the other side of an uncrossed road. The nurse said he would be fine. Which meant he was soon to die in any case, so whatever happened was somehow in the natural order of things. I said perhaps, but how natural is it to live to eighty-nine? In the emergency room, there were others of more importance. Gunshot wounds, a man with his leg near severed off, a small girl who was barely breathing. My father was a doctor himself. He would know there were no cures. With the right tubes and ECGs, with the right electrical surveillance, there’s really no need to worry, and no need for a constant professional presence. He was a doctor, they said, so he would understand. I was the one worried that he might live another day, and find this silence in the machinery disturbing. The hospital was big as a cathedral, and though he worked there, I myself was always lost. It was not that the faces changed; they were all one face, unchanging. What I once thought was a snake from the head of Medusa, turned out to be the staff of Hermes, the alchemist, the conjuror. A symbol of restraint, control. But if you strike down hard with it, they say a weeping river will rise up out of the stone. Riding North out of San Juan Capistrano Each curve demands the body be reborn. The bike bends and slants into an oblique world so one can right oneself and go on. The road becomes the skin of sense you lose when your mother releases you from the void that becomes a life, a pattern in the maze, that years later creates itself again as meaning pulled from the ball of chaos like a single thread. Highway 1 through L.A. is a wasteland of chainlink fences and ruptured sidewalks laid out along abandoned rows of warehouses with bricked up windows and steel doors. When the freeway dies you’re on an open street exposed. A delirium of mechanical sounds agglomerates: the traffic chirr of trucks blindsided by mirrored sedans, the combustion of particle time fuses and coughs, garroted and dented in shorthaul journeys, ram-air breaths of a city gone long before you fill your lungs, old immigrant city that has given way to soot and human dust like fallout from some future atomic war. And your breath is the steel lining of transport. Inner-cities bleed into each other, Signal Hill Wilmington Harbor City Torrance Walleria RedondoHermosaManhattanBeachElPorto until you are free of the stuttering lights and clinched wheels, the screech of escape from hours of the tightening confluence. When somewhere north of Santa Monica you break loose from the nightmare center of the apoplectic cell, breathing erratic dreams of blind-alley suburbia, of sweet children waiting, of husbands in shirt-sleeve before TVs, of wives in gray aprons washing, in nirvanic quarries of kitchen sinks, sipping the stasis of first martinis through the straw of a new plastic wisdom, believing there is nothing north of the city limits but the next city, the next neighborhood where radios ululate with repeated dreams of location, and miss your body’s streak into the road’s escape. The Dead Horse for Cecília MeirelesIn a field of winter wheat gone brittle in the mouth of the wind, I stumble across the golden body of a friend whose time was such that she lay down and the wheat became her. She has sunken in, kissing the earth with her whole head, completely at rest, possibly free, it is hard for anyone else to say. The garden of her thoughts are winds stirring the flanks of her time, and I watch, that act of seeing that is lost, itself something never regained. It was late afternoon, and just a little cold. That was the name given death. I waited for the rest, for the monuments, the carvings of great men, the impossible fires and cremation into the air. But she was there in the earth half buried, half part of this moment alone, waiting for me to drag her into life. Saint Quintilla Favored with the iron spits, the cross-beams on a saltire cross, so sure of the path that you dropped your name on a small French town, but then you died a martyr in Sorrento, Italy. Little more is known. Without irony, the asteroid 755 bears your name. Discovered in 1908 by one Metcalf. Or was it Meta-calf, the perfect cow, carrying stones rolled once into our history. Ellipsoidal solid bodies, all of us, no perfect spherical hope. M class asteroids. The heavens filled with history’s debris. Were you the fifth child, named after the Roman tribe Quintii? When your name was first Quentin. Is this where Faulkner found you, in the deeper outer dark: Have you ever had a sister? Have you? The legacy of heretic or prophetess. We see only the broken wheel, the tortures. Of what were you so sure? Why deny or not deny? If it were only a measure of wheat, something real, or any quantity of grain. If it were only a weight of stone or a section of land, or more than or less than some thing that rests in this world. But it was not. The patron saint of bombardiers, of locksmiths, and porters. A prisoner of what remains. And for the poor poet who searches for names not forms, nothing more than an octosyllabic quintet rhyme. A measure of the meanness of the world. from The Hermits of Dingle River Ice The river cracks in syllables, impossible to say that here we step but once, for with ice the river sways, buckles back upon itself, and bleeds its own universe of words. Across the icy way from where Niagara Park ends, other children are staring into our void. They challenge us, each other, testing fear for its power of renewal. A half-mile perhaps, this white street of glass, a field that suddenly contracts. You hear it give up winter ghosts; beneath it our worlds do not exist, the cold too cold to imagine. For us, the Arctic begins right here, the next Ice Age. Out past where our mothers will say was good sense, we chance our way. These words themselves might shift, weather already warming, and with our retreat only the water beneath is moved to wave. The Hermits of Dingle Nothing but rock and gannet guano, and the sparse kinds of grasses that cling to the inevitable, and cliff edges gouged by bluster and cold Irish sea, and this beauty, stark as a shelled moon. The clachan, beehive huts, coned in dry stone masonry, no cill to hide in from the gaoth blown up from the fuming coves, and here to contemplate the will of God, and one’s own will’s failure, comprehend how the taste of nothing can sate a restive anima that has fed on worlds and gained no weight, light as a shearwater or kittiwake, fix-winged, afloat on lifts of anonymous air. And how in time the eye-length of the world runs a course from Skellig rooks to shore, and back, interminably, and white-capped rocks at lantern’s edge bead to a focal point and score the night as on a living stone. Survivor Suite Phoenix hotel zone density thins to the razorwire playgrounds Aztec Bride My Tuxedo a motel for the first night next to Faith North School Running easy, Hohokam canals running beneath these desert-clean streets Garfield historic district gravel yards artificial turf chain-linked corner lots a man squatting no, a sago palm crossing the sunken freeways invisible to the empty streets the bungalows on half-acre lots broad boulevards for avenues sunshine strips the wide arteries of fear, the quiet morning light penetrates time, that disabler wakes a line of identical doors slowly a man cleans out his car soft Mexican crooner sings from his half-dozen bassy speakers four men shift feet in a yard around a grill, Hatch chilies roast in Saturday morning stillness aged hippies laugh out loud from a bench, one gray black beard glistens in last night’s dew as trees, the Bradford pear mock snow in white bud glean in the desert heat of streetlights the city still slow to wake slow all day in the heat echoes a primal urge to be nowhere dissolving amid long grids of even streets seeing the old golden waters Yavapai to Camelback and White Tank mountains a landscape of railroads and mines John Birch mumbling in his drink, to waken evangelicals turning right and right again territorial capital, awkward lean towers Chase Westward Ho Sheraton skyline high-rise fountain in an arid land surviving the extremes of planted oasis crime kings and beasts of burden and out on a Saturday morning the pre-heat sympathies of an old woman led by a dog and children playing in a jet stream from a cracked yard hose. Kathmandu Back before the neon city, when cars blew by you in a fit of dust, when trees were thin as pencil lead (but there were trees), and stupas warped for centuries in monsoon swelling heat, still held together with hand-forged nails, there was a hostel off Pie Street, where foreigners always moved through various states of meditation, transmigration, bubbles of consciousness, around the winter solstice and Christmas that year. At the U.S. Embassy, they served us scotch with ice, the taste forgotten for a year, served up for transient trippers like children at a poor man’s knees, and said this was the American thing to do, to bless those who the rest of the world left forgotten in infected, Indian prisons, or trapped at borders whenever the war with Pakistan renewed. Seasonal greetings. But it was something anyway. And more than the cold room, washing my hair in an icy tap, and curling tight in a thin bag to sleep out December’s failing light. The scotch warmed, silk soaked in the smoke of a wood fire, an old scarf around my inner core. And the sleeper awoke, the season revealed, all in the smile of a Buddhist hearing an Embassy staffer’s joke. That was the first Christmas away. Now, every one not home returns me to the East, to the cold that was a cure for the season’s isolation. To that brief contact with others. As clear a moment in my mind as the single candle heating the hostel room. Capela dos Ossos A space full of bones, the monks’ map of the next world, or the world as they see it, here, among the ephemeral, the fragile, the mothers whose children have disappeared. No children’s bones were used in the construction of this chapel the sign reads. We believe in an even chance. Light low as the meditative atmosphere of a tomb, but with a thousand femurs, a thousand more elbows, a hundred ripened skulls. The walls draped out in death, old death, ancient sensibilities, finding our way along a broken world, grave by grave. Then suddenly, in the street again, the unmapped day infused with sunlight. This hidden nave, Évora, Portugal, farms sprouting new wheat, olive orchards, sunflower and oilseed. The lane leads slowly back to life. Last Gas for a Thousand Miles It’s out there on the edge of things, out past the café with its pink flamingos next to the railroad tracks, where the engineer stops on Wednesdays to have a bite to eat, his engine sitting restless, wheezing, at the knife-edge of the universe. It’s on the road mistaken for the road from town, for no one comes this way, the desert just beyond digests the living in a mouth of sand, and sun seems to shimmer on a vein of blood. Riding into the swayback station, in leather spacesuit, chaps and goggles glazed with a paint of insects, you see the next dimension, a liminal storefront simulacrum, light of stars and lights of towns just down the road rising on the highway’s wet mirage. To survive this coming world, you’ll have to choose another mate, a scorpion perhaps. Skin will fuse to bone before you acclimate, the sky will drop in tidal waves of rain, flushing arroyos clean across your trail. It’s said the insects grow to giant science fictions. Your meek five gallons galvanized by time, you’re born out on a flagellum of road, a new body of glass fused from light and an ancient world of sand. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
