George Moore



Proverbs

A drowning man may clutch at a straw, but he has to be dying to really float.
Who was it spoke to me in my sleep, and were those words, symbols, images?
How the world will end is no one’s concern.
Consider the mole and consider darkness only another beautiful avenue.
But then what of human consciousness? Can it really be captured in a word?
An ounce of perversion is worth a pound of curry…or is it better to have hotdogs at the opera?
Can one kindle that first flame without singeing their clothes and smoking their hearts?
Is the future all of words, of letters, of ink, and images flashed across the dull cerebral screen?
Or does the future exists without words, whereas the present and past are tattoos on sagging flesh.
Better to be born a fool than to find oneself surrounded by mirrors.
It’s a sly dog that knows when to come home and curl before a fire someone else has set.



Evolution

Solar Mass

The suns kneel.
It is as it should be.
There is talk among
the French that
blackhole
is not appropriate.
Not appropriate
in French, for whom?
The soul is not,
after all, a singularity.
More a particle
spit out of
the hot soup,
post-Big Bang.
But this too forgets
the fabric. Spacetime
not a chessboard
nor a warping
of shies. Gravity
does not kneel.
We, then, are
the cagy repro
ductions. A requiem
rotating in the drag
of stellar grief.
The stained glass
stained no more.
Glass is what we are.
The universe holding us
up to the light.



Cloud Formulas

The Hanging Note

Right there, where the violin squeezes
time between two beats, a niche in sound
(the maestro capable of much fast speeds!),
is the mark of genius, rising in the hanging note,
the nanosecond it takes the heart to repeat
when it falls completely under the spell
of sound, transporting us across a silent world.

Thinking of these: Erik Satie, Arvo Part, Keith Jarrett,
and the primal hintings of changes
sweeping through the body:
the hesitation, the need. I am watching
boats by the dock separate from the wharf
like notes on a scale written in blue
against the bay pulse of ocean tide.

If I could spread these notes out on a sheet,
a skin of beach, scaling into future time,
running close as the universe is born and dies,
would I pass quietly, physically,
through some portal into the perfect place?
And if these strings and keys are maps,
do we live on the fringes of their silences?




George Moore writes: "I'm now living in a lobster fishing village on the south shore of Nova Scotia. And writing a good deal. I have two collections of recent date, Children's Drawings of the Universe with Salmon Poetry, out next month, and The Hermits of Dingle (FutureCycle 2013). I've published or have things coming out this year in Valparaiso, Blue Fifth Review, Five Poetry, Empty Mirror, Osiris, Allegro, High Desert Journal, and a few others."
 
 
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