Spring 2009, Volume 6

Poetry by George Moore

Desert Run

The ride out of Spanish Folk
takes you down by Jericho Junction,
but the desert takes you out

into territory that does not relent
when the sun defines it harshly,
when the day does not cool but shines

around Servier Lake, a bed of salt
and sand, that seems a fitting image,
mirage or hope, for what you've come

this way to escape, the jungle tangles
of past living. The Ice Age lakes
would have covered this all in blue

from Sierras to San Pitch and Wasatch,
and old Numic echoes of the few
nomadic voices, Shoshone and Paiute,

ride along with you, dropping
out of the highlands into Death Valley.
The sudden fist of heat is a release

in May, later and you would cook.
The silvery spots vanishing off the road
are ghost thin images, echoes

of thirst, the bones of other's dreams.
But sand is a color in itself complete,
from brush to red, picking up the sun

against the drifting evening, and
the heat dies down, finally retreats,
as you ride up toward Lake Tahoe

with teeth grinding desert culture,
and a panoramic uncut history running
through your veins like mud.

Fishing Boats in Hofsos Bay

The fishing boats are moored against the stones,
the sea is calm. The fish are slowly undone

by the new evolution, into human history, warming
as the seas turn to soup, as the small planet burns.

The blue whiting codfish wild salmon pelagic herring
hurt by the times, but the times do not revert, move

never backward into what was, and death no longer
a transmigration. The boats rest uneasy in the bay

waiting for the calling, the rapture, that will like
volcanoes on the island send out word across

the barren plains in fire and ash, and smoke
and carbon dioxide. The men who man the boats

are not dead, they are reflections of the fish
that exist beneath the waves, that surge up through

air and smoke, and change, and they watch
as the sun burns through the northern haze

and the other fish, on the shore, begin to smell. Now
they pray. And throw their lines in with the history of fish.

Downstream

from the ashes
dumped in the Ganges
the turtles eat the remains
of what has not burned
but entered the sacred
world of the river

like the fragments
of past lives that haunt us
when we sleep uneasy
in the mix of what we
cannot remember and what
we are coming to be.

From the bathers
blessing themselves clean
before the heat of the day
creeps into bones and
underneath the flesh
to sever the cold

image of heaven
from the jungled madness
of crowded plain and
city streets, and rich
differences in Sikh, Hindu,
Buddhist, Jain.

And beside the Taj
where the black temple
was to be, the Yamuna
saunters downstream
carrying the prayers
of the war deceased

to liquid graves
and the great fields
of rice, wheat, oilseeds,
and sugarcane, burgeoning
into the present world,
sustaining what is human.

Fished Out

I wander out into
the stream, knee-deep
with my heavy waders
and my nine-foot bamboo
an old girlfriend gave me
just before she vanished,
or split, but the fish
are real enough. Now
they too are dying,
nibbling on lead sinkers
in their death-pocket,
the species non-specific,
at the center of our world.
This argument suddenly
seems reversed. If you
eat meat from the frozen
food trough in your
favorite Whole Foods
store, what is the diff
from killing fish with
hook and line, tight bite
and yank to draw in
their death-eye fear?
Or better still,
poisoning them
with your gear?


BIO:  Much of my work of late has been in collaboration with artists in Europe. I had a showing of poetry and concept art with the French Canadian artist, Mireille Perron, at Can Serrat, Spain, in 2007, and I'm doing another with the Scandinavian textile artist, Hrafnhildur Sigur_ardóttir, for an exhibition in Iceland later this year. I'm also doing some work with the Obras group in Portugal this spring. I also translate from the Spanish, and mostly from the Mexico poet Jose Emilio Pacheco, who I met and was in contact with some years ago. I have published his work in translation in places like The Mississippi Review and Chelsea.

I have published poetry in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, North American Review, Orion, Colorado Review, Nimrod, Meridian, Chelsea, Southern Poetry Review, Southwest Review, Chariton Review, and have been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. I was a finalist for the 2007 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, from Ashland Poetry Press, and earlier for The National Poetry Series, The Brittingham Poetry Award, and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. My recent collections are Headhunting (Edwin Mellen, 2002), poems exploring the ritual practices of love and possession, and an e-Books, All Night Card Game in the Back Room of Time (Pulpbits, 2007).