Miles David Moore
THE MAN WHO HATED OCEANS
They were too big for his blood.
He walked alongside them, resenting
the grit and shell-shards stabbing his feet,
the stink of dead fish, the animal roar
of vast, undrinkable amorphousness,
the waves that first kissed, then slapped, the shore.
He saw absolutely nothing remarkable
about Tinkertoy freighters in the pinpoint distance
or Ken-doll surfers in their death-wish curl.
Staring at calm seas from a balcony
or the turbulent heights of a jet,
he thought them a sop to the cult of romance,
a mirror for the world’s self-regard.
He preferred rivers—or, more accurately, creeks.
He loved—no, not loved; felt comfortable with—
the damming of water in narrow ditches.
Creeks flowed serenely in subdued confinement,
and when they jumped their banks, everyone agreed
they were wrong and bad. They could be diverted
for anybody’s purpose, even his.
This validation buoyed his soul until,
at last, he found his own narrow ditch.
Miles David Moore is a Washington reporter for Crain Communications, Inc. He is founder and host of the Iota Poetry Reading Series in Arlington, VA, a member of the Board of Directors of The Word Works, Inc., and administrator of The Word Works Washington Prize. He is the author of three books of poetry: The Bears of Paris (The Word Works Capital Collection, 1995); Buddha Isn't Laughing (Argonne Hotel Press, 1999); and Rollercoaster (The Word Works Capital Collection, 2004). With Karren LaLonde Alenier and Hilary Tham, he co-edited Winners: A Retrospective of the Washington Prize, published in 1999 by The Word Works. Fatslug Unbound, a CD of Moore's poetry read by himself and 14 other poets, was realeased in 2000 by Minimus Productions. His review/essays on the poet John Haines have appeared in The Wilderness of Vision (Story Line Press, 1996) and A Gradual Twilight (CavanKerry Press, 2003).
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