George Moore

2 poems


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The Puzzle in the New York Times

On any Sundays, the man, the father, would end where he began, denying time for the better part of the day, as if once settled into who he was at this moment through a calculation of his previous leaps and bounds, minus, of course, the unconscious reckoning of his real, timeless, self, he would lounge around the house in boxers and half-slippers, waiting for the great race to begin, and dreaming, we all imagined, of the clop of horses and daily forms. But words were a games, a quinella, better the word than some inexplicable undercurrent of off-colored self-realizations, in any case, and perhaps it was the weather, after all. Whatever kept him at it, there was never a corner unturned. The proper letters, the stair of forms, which should have made it so much easier, or more complete (his thinking I’m sure), for what are our efforts continuing into the weekend but the recognition of yourself as the center of a small sphere of friends and a larger sphere of events, all of which have gone their way, fading into innumerable sunsets, as it were, without even a sense of their own time or the time it would take to write out in little boxes the names of the missing, which is what came back to him in the end, the missing in action, in schools, in hospitals, and of course the missing from the kitchen, the game room, the bedroom, but enough, it was his way of doing nothing while doing it all, unfolding himself as a warp in time, as it were, tunneling through words, drawn in from anywhere and nowhere, and left dancing on his brain until it entered the galaxy of sleep, securing his identity in the indentation of the sofa, a surface must like the plane of time, distorted by the body landing just so the head can finally take off.

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Foreign Legions

It was my grandmother’s way of putting things off, the Final Judgment being more important than the judgments that come before, but then also her way of saying that if you leave this behind it will follow you into the next world, so deal with it here and now, although now was a relative term, for she would always remembered moments, each in their own curve, from a childhood in Turkey to the final days on the Colorado Plateau, without thinking of the landscapes, and I wondered, of the people?—those who were running by during the slaughter of the Armenians, hiding as a little girl behind the high walls of the college where Christ was spoken of as a sacrifice, and the past itself struggling to come out in the light of the 20^th century, beyond the bloodied stones, the deaths, perpetuating the name among the heathen (a word that turned her cold), the same as among those who say they have a right to exterminate them, and that now it was so different from the last, which passed almost imperceptibly into the future, the small apartment she had in the city dying with her, the memories becoming secondhand stories, the names of the dead hammered into my history like nails she’d placed in the wood of my head.

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return to sawbuck 5.2

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George Moore's poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Queen's Quarterly, Antigonish Review, Dublin Quarterly, Orion, and Blast. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes, “Best of the Web” and "Best of the Net" awards, and The Rhysling Poetry Award and The Wolfson Poetry Prize in 2010. His sixth collection of poems, Children's Drawings of the Universe, will be published by Salmon Poetry Ltd. in 2012. He teaches literature and writing with the University of Colorado, Boulder.