Sample Poems by Richard Moore
Transformation
At the threshold of old age
to find the whole building changed
as a glove pulled inside-out:
to press instep on the high sill,
hearing a sonata of Schubert
muffled within, in the salon--
then the door is flung open and rock,
rock music in the glare, blares.
Look at them dancing! It's
a brothel. . . Was it always?
They say now what a lousy
family it was. I thought it
was good, basically. Sure,
the suicide attempts--but no one
succeeded. They're all in college.
That proves it was a good family,
doesn't it? Wasn't I gentle,
festive, full of old tunes, rock-
firm in the old house? So I write them:
Stay away from here this Christmas.
When the Pains Begin
They were so easy for you always, endings,
beginnings. When your flesh first teemed
and my palm, touching your stretched belly,
felt faint punches of fist or knee within,
and the pains began, and in the town
where a thousand years ago the great
battle was fought, "The delivery room!
Get me there!" you called. "O love,"
said the nurses, "it'll be hours yet.
The first one's always the hardest." But
shaking their heads at your impatience
and marveling how you kept getting your way,
loaded your light body on the stretcher,
wheeled you into the corridor, and there,
right there, you pushed the new life out.
In the Sunset
Contrail aglitter still,
still sunlit, where a jet bomber
pricks through blue, while here below
low cloud's gone gray. I know what
it's like to be there--up there--
the dials, switches, the pale fluorescence,
the impersonality of the cockpit.
But now a duck passes
crosswise to the contrail but far
below--below the dark cloud even,
barely above me at all. Yet
there I have never been, nor ever
shall. Still she flies, flies
alone into her night.
Dry Season
December. The sun is gone.
The water shrinks, like the gums
of an old man. Bank bares--
rocks packed tight--like teeth.
The clouds are turning pink.
I watch them through chain link fence.
They're shut away from me,
distant as a Titian painting.
He saw them first. And the pond,
his also--mellow, ripe.
All that, not mine, taken.
So much! Where are you now?
With your lover in that cute
tearoom where the others
all. . . Our daughter described it.
No, that is not you. . .and I too
grow other. . . I too grasp. . .
at Titian's clouds, till they
--as, watching me, they must--
turn gray, gray now as dust.
Ordering Information: Bookstores and Individuals