New waves out of the night's mist and obscurity
lunge up high on the beach, spending their energy,
    each wave angrily dying,
        all shapes endlessly altering,

yet out there in the depths nothing is modified.
Earthquakes won't even move--no, nor the hurricane--
    one stone there, nor a glance of
         sun's light stir its identity.

Published in Romantics Quarterly

Richard Moore's comments to THT's editor: "Your kind words about my poem, 'Depths,' by the way, made me wonder if you knew that it is in a precise metrical scheme from antiquity. Taking w to mean a stressed (ancient long) and v an unstressed (ancient short) syllable, the pattern is:

w w w v v w w v v w v v
w w w v v w w v v w v v
w w w v v w v
w w w v v w v v



The Freeze

The deep cold comes, and even the great
pond is frozen, dusted with snow,
luminous under Venus, the moon,  
suburban lights on the dark hills.

The cold wind has blown over and over
it, and now it is still, my mind,   
frozen, determined, and still the wind
shrieks. Let there be no end of it.

Published in Neovictorian/Cochlea



Man, Boy, Birds

Blackbirds caw, big against gray sky.
A boy stands in a house nearby.
In a tree's spine one of them digs
with its hooked beak at the dead twigs

and seems to pick at the year's dregs.
One glides, and lets down spidery legs,
a jagged darkness on cold sky.
He at his window sees them fly.

He must. Young boy, he stares and dreams.
A blackbird puffs its breast and screams.
No, he can't hear--can't hear, as I,
the silence in that black bird's cry.

Published in The Formalist



In The Dark Season

I

I fall out of the foliage of my feelings.
That is the beginning, the ending,
when the orange peels appear
from the shrinking lips of the snow
and broken bottles, still clinging to their labels,
in the gutter outside the church.
A silk stocking coils in the mud.
In the dark season, someone has sown
the seed of confusion. The church will graze
on the flowers, the fruits of love,
the soft nutritious pulp of remorse.
Do these events signify
summertime in another hemisphere?
One studied a new language in the darkness,
looked far down into the well,
into the hints of sunlight in its depths.

II

We are dead such a long time before
and will be dead such a long time after
this leaping into light
as a dolphin leaps from the sea
and carries the glare of that moment
back among the curious creatures
who have not known the light.
Don't tell me this is like Plato's cave;
I know that. But in death, our element,
who swims with us? Do we even?
If God is light...No, but there may be,
as the poet says, a soft monster 
deeply sleeping among his thousand 
arms under millennia
unnumbered, and enormous polypi.
I think we have been frightened into life
as fish leap from greater fish below.
We cry angrily in our cradles,
then overcome, grow tranquil through the years,
hopefully, ready ever for the depths
ever ready for us.

III

Yes, but of course, there is the need
for symmetry. Matter calls out
for antimatter, which forthwith
sings in the shadows. Thus, tonight
streetlight fingers new foliage
with breezes making light of it,
where unseen trunk divides itself
into a multitude of tips
above ground and below, as in
a mirror, strangers to each other,
two lives, depending on each other,
therefore the same life: in dark depth
and moisture one, in dry sunlight
the other: God and Satan, one,
female and male in each one, one.
Dolphins from darkness visit light.
Who from her glitter visits us?
These, lost inside you: look outside
in the not-you: you find them there.



The Old Men
 
O Lord, teach us, us mad old men, to pray.
Eyes blinking in the sun's deceiving glow,
we are disgruntled with the light of day.

We sit unseeing where the children play.
We stand unfeeling when the breezes blow.
O Lord, teach us, us mad old men, to pray

that we may hear, as always, far away
singing of birds, sounds that we used to know . . .
We are disgruntled with the light of day

and angry with the objects that betray
impatient fingers, grasping, stiff and slow.
O Lord, teach us, us mad old men, to pray

gently, to taste our dinner and be gay,
delighting in the touch of things although
we are disgruntled with the light of day.

Slowly all colors, as our hairs, go gray.
Is this the only world, decaying so?
O Lord, teach us, us mad old men, to pray.
We are disgruntled with the light of day.

Published in The Lyric, Spring 1993
 


Hymn to an Automatic Washer

      O wise God of our fathers,
we love You, yet...one question bothers:
      has no one ever quashed
reports that Jesus seldom washed?
      And who can think a greasy
and soiled St. Francis of Assisi
      could cleanly love The Lord?
Shall we imagine he ignored
      those lice between his toes
when he blessed each creature that grows--
      each creature, born or hatched?
Shall we suppose he never scratched--
      though vexed with itching poxes?
Who can resolve such paradoxes?

     You can, God of our daughters!--
swirler of heated soapy waters,
     immaculate machine,
where DUZ does everything so clean.
     Cleanse us, if we have sinned,
spin-dry us, lest we flap in wind,
     exposed to harmful germs.
As every snowy shirt affirms
     with underdrawers in chorus,
a new white Idol stands before us,
     rolling its sudsy eye.
America, thy sons reply,
     Down with the old gods! Beat
them into scrap, they're obsolete.

     Warranted washer, prim
in thy enamel and chrome trim,
     we celebrate thy birth.
Whirl on! Protect us from the earth!
     Lead forth this Land's creations
and sterilize the unwashed nations;
     O thou, our helm and shield,
launder those lilies of the field!

Published in Harper's Magazine, March 1967



When In Rome...

There was once a fat diner named Schlurp.
After dinner he'd noisily burp.
     Said his wife, "Go and dine a
     few decades in China,
where everyone does that, you twerp!"

Published in Light Quarterly, Number 20, Autumn 2000



Signals

In the small hours of the morning
the cars leave the intersection in peace
mostly, and you can hear the lone
buzzing of two traffic lights which give
their red and green directions to

no one--only sometimes a late
car that in passing drowns them out.
Yet it heeds them. I watch too, feel
sympathy for their quiet, undisturbed
uselessness, their solitary, secret song:

their arcane hum, hinting deep inner
functioning. Quiet! Signals at work,
setting the night in order, blinking.
Do we pay them to stand there hour after hour?
With what? Our brains, intelligence?

We changed ourselves to have them there . . . .
And who paid the sentry in his box
to keep stolidly, mechanically his place
when the sky over Pompeii fell?
Or was he just hooked up, as these--

or as I, hooked to these images?
Brave standards! Noble throbbing posts!
When the day comes and the whole sky falls,
stand, stand, transform the tragic scene:
change all greens to red, all reds to green.

Published in Poetry, June 1985



Oswald Spengler

He said that mathematics was an art
      and won my heart;
that cultures die; the sign of death, a Caesar--
      O, what a teaser!--

and once they're dead, stay dead. No one's at home
      in Ancient Rome,
that took grand Greece with it. And how divine a
      pattern for China?

Nothing in China for TWO THOUSAND years,
      decadent dears...
O yes, Tang art, then Buddhism...but then
      Tao becomes Zen,

and nothing really changes, nothing's new....
      Nothing is true
everywhere all the time; everything grows,
      rooted, for those

who see deeper than logic, learn to hate your
      dead laws of nature.
Hey, was it Spengler speaking there, or me?
      Easy to see...

I had to have thought-countries rich and strange
      where I could range,
as once, among wild thoughts of our black maid,
      I skipped and played,

and hoped someday to live down the disgrace
      of my dead race,
as if I'd grasped the strangeness of my portion,
      I, failed abortion.

Mother felt guilty. Drugs she took, the dear,
      had made me queer.
But no, they gave me Spengler, made me blest
      in our dead West.



A Farewell to Dentistry

I keep my spiritual purity,
living on social security
and a stupid little pension
      unworthy of mention.

I'm glad I'm not a winner,
stay home and eat my dinner.
"Damn restaurants!" I shout
      through teeth falling out,

safe from those mangy curs,
those greedy plunderers,
dentists well trained to trounce
      our savings accounts,

who stuff our mouths with gauze
and crowd our aching jaws
with shipment after shipment
       of clumsy equipment,

with implants, dentures, braces....
Your food's flavor erases;
you feel your juices stall,
       taste nothing at all.

O offspring of some tart,
this growing old's an art;
so make dinner yourself
      from cans on your shelf

or packets in your freezer,
and smile content, old geezer,
as toothlessly you savor
      each glorious flavor.

Aromas! Waft aloft
from tastes tender and soft,
not too hot, not too icy,
      and wonderfully spicy.

Dentistry's like the world,
populous, fancy-girled.
Constantly it's attacking.
      Laugh, sending it packing!



The Stream
 
Deftly the water spills
down through the deep-cleft hills
and in its smooth release
moves, yet is at peace.

Image of calm desire,
I'll try not to admire
perversity that calls
men to the roaring falls,

where earth seems to give way
and the stream speeds in spray,
broken, and below knocks
its heart out on the rocks.

Published in Romantics Quarterly



Ménage á Deux:  Songs for a Father-to-be
 
She's pregnant, none more beautiful than she.
        Inside her we can feel
the future stirring; outside we can see
        darkly the storm birds wheel.
Like Berkeley's God, I labor constantly
        to keep this frail world real.

        No little tendrils of the heart
    bind strong enough when little ruptures start;
people who live together learn to live apart.

"Can't you be someone else once in a while?"
        My question starts her smile.
She gives her head a toss and calmly eyes me:
        "Why don't you fantasize me?
But come to think of it," her look grows steady,
        "that's what you do already."

The year's darkness, the miracle of birth,
        animal me, my worth
as calculated in the drift of stars,
        prices of prunes, sports cars...
O stuff all that! Where is the world that she
        dreamt of, now wants to see?

        Let's go again!--upon all fours.
    Let's close our houses up, live out of doors,
we, destined to become extinct as dinosaurs.

        Technology keeps going faster,
    its future still unfolding, ever vaster.
Earth cries, Human intelligence--what a disaster!

But no, the tent's folded, no longer sunned in
        the hills of France and Spain,
where streams flow night and day, a campsite one din
        from which we can refrain,
stuffed into winter countryside, from London
        two easy hours by train.
  
        I see nothing--yes, nothing right
    there in the afternoon, already night,
its faces all aglow with false electric light;

and I remember unreality
        first flooding into me,
washing my mother's earnest luncheon word
        into the vast absurd.
I took it with me back to boarding school,
        she gone then, I its tool.

        The only real question was when
    I would go mad, marching with Caesar's men.
Look now: I'm laboring at Latin once again.

She lay in dimness with the candle lit,
        back bare, me rubbing it.
Some words, now lost, went between me and her,
        and then it seemed there were
no words, nothing to touch or hold in store,
        between us any more.

        Day after day, she wakes, she feeds
    both of them. O, memento of our deeds
there, always there, a tiresome queer shape with needs--

she says, "Things that I think I'll say sound dumb,
        so I don't say them. True
enough, but they'd sound silly. So I strum
        the guitar, sing....I'll do
differently soon, my dear; soon I'll become
        sullen and closed like you."

        Then quietly, no sigh, no moan:
    "I see I'm to have this baby alone.
You are a killer, Dick." And thus a seed is sown.

"Don't let me kill you!" frantically I plead.
        She laughs, from her mood freed,
"I feel better already. You don't moan.
        You just wander alone
and only get more gloomy and morose."
        The seed! I hold it close--
 
managed, however, from that soil to dig me
        my image of the Pygmy,
suggesting life more magical and mythic
        in the late Paleolithic.
I've put all that into another book.
        Interested, Reader?...Look!

        'N editor I'm to see, upon
    my word, a London literary don,
my critical hairs combed, int'lectu'l necktie on.

The lies we live by subtly consume us.
        Bury us, then, in humus
since we were human. Read, Reader, appalled,
        but don't blame that on me!
The deepest lie we tell is the lie called
        sentimentality,

and of its forms the worst is facile gloom,
        the automatic rages
like mine that kill all feeling....Let love bloom!
        How deeply it engages
when the immortal Schubert, magic rager,
        modulates into major!

        The publisher is in his house;
       winds will not blow him, nor will downpours douse.
He knows he mustn't publish 'n epic 'bout a mouse.

If things aren't getting better (now the rage)
        then in some golden age
(sometimes I would be "I," but mostly "it")
        all unfit things would fit,
all categories blend and cease their clamor.
        That puts an end to grammar,

and frees me, doesn't it? I'll dance about,
        let all my feelings out,
living in holiness and simple awe, per-
        haps actually a pauper
and not just faking it, concealing wealth
        to cheat National Health.
 
         We got the whole damn baby free:
    hospital, doctor, nurse, dispensary....
(procedures and their names change when you cross the sea.)

How long did Adam, Eve, gardening peons,
        live before falling? Eons!
The Stone-Age hunters whom my spirit craves,
        living in draughty caves,
changed not once in a hundred thousand years
        the way they tipped their spears.

        Had they no passions to be vented,
    to keep on going on like that, contented,
free of our mania for change, as though demented?

Each week--habit from which I cannot budge--
        I cook a pound of fudge.
The emptiness of life demands that filler.
        It is my sweetness-pillar
huge for me there: catlike I made and fenced it
        and rub myself against it.

        Conrad, black male, is huge, to see
    on windowsills, but hard to capture. He
(God knows how he lives) fills woods with his progeny.

Surrounded by the bored and boring Brits
        in pubs sad Richard sits.
They, for whom everything has happened, wait
        for one more twist of fate,
which creeps, alas now, slower than molasses.
        Time still to fill their glasses.

        Open to misery, distress,
    I, female, give it--palpable!--access.
It enters, comes. I'm left pregnant with hopelessness.

The winding road, the clipped and tonsured earth:
        a woman's giving birth.
Warm pulpy beings, clever, know so much
        impossible to touch;
masters of concepts difficult to name,
        they will rot just the same.
 
        Wives come to help out, fuss and fix,
    cheap tongues for advertising's vulgar tricks.
There are no peasants left nowadays, only hicks.

God, will I spoil it for her, home today,
        forget, say, what to say?
Lose my poor wits in fits and mindless fretting?
        She stands there, "It's like getting
a doll for Christmas, Dick--that's what I feel--
        except this doll is real."

        Where with this wild child may my way be?
    I, no one...do I feel...jealousy maybe
of my heroic wife? Come on! Let's kill the baby.

In the sharp bathroom light that hardly flattered,
        her face looked ravaged, shattered.
She seemed to come apart, seemed toothy, spiky,
        the sweet calm in her psyche
usurped, canceled by brute power within,
        the new stranger, our kin.

        My story ends, the future hid.
    I, all my rubbish still under its lid,
never went mad. O God! She in that crib there did.

Published in Edge City Review



Back Then

In times before my species grew demented,
     before the first wheel was invented
     or great machines with mammoth force
          remodeled the golf course;

before the artificial pond's far shore
    glittered with lights--O long before
    each evening glowed like Babylon
        as soon as they came on--

I wandered here beside the living water
   and thought about a child, my daughter,
   and rocks that are the water's mold,
        that sit here, hard and cold.

Back then I knew each generation joins
     mystery, sleeping in its loins,
     as rocks join water at the shore,
         and the rocks move no more.

Published in The Denver Q



The Tennis Ball

One day, ten years ago, vexed with the world,
I cut a tennis ball in half, shaped, peeled,
and cut the cups, until they snugly fit
my darkened eyes and let no seam of light in,
tied with elastic tape one wife ago;
and then I plugged my ears, sat still, and waited.
I often slept; often unwritten poems,
new landladies, seduction, or divorce
came snapping through the darkened silences;
yet, there were times when I came somewhere else,
seeming to float in the pure nothingness
convention calls myself. There I have seen,
like witches' sabbaths in the stormy moonlight,
curious wars, the shapes of nightmare, tongues,
luminous caverns darkly opening,
violent gory colors in the depths,
yet all subscribing to a playfulness,
a sense of childlike, long-lost fantasy.
Often my body's strongest hungers, drawn
into the reservoir, were softly drowned,
while I presided at the silent birth
of galaxies--whole eons, as it seemed,
wound on the pinpoint of a moment, sinking--
mere nothings--and the thought: this, then, is bliss.
When I came back, full of my emptiness,
things were a vivid presence once again,
not separate, but a part of me, as always.

Published in Poetry             



Pygmies

I.

Praised be The Lord who, along with my bad teeth, blessed me with patience,
   and, when the patience was gone,
                                                               knotted my heart with despair:
fear of it stirs me to dream up these eerie magnificent verses,
   that, without readers, will cause
                                                            deeper despair than they cure,
which will, in turn, urge out more verses, until I'm a tombstone.
   Such is the fever that still
                                                burns for the poison and drinks.
Is it not thus that my perverse lusts and desires would have it?
   Is it not suitable thus? 
                                          Sadness that darkens my heart,
think of the vacant and trivial eyes of the spirits in Heaven,
   joyously singing to God
                                              Johann Sebastian Bach
all week long--and on days off, Mozart, purely for pleasure.
   Angels have need of our song. 
                                                         What could they think up themselves,
steeped in desireless bliss and the unpained loves of the Blesse'd?
   Bone-deep suffering here
                                                deepens our frivolous hearts
when they survive it; and then, when they don't one day, it is over,
    Heavenly music and God,
                                                  all our absurdities, gone
out of our cold heads, as from its tomb the cadaver of Pharaoh:
   sealed in its coffin of gold,
                                                  royal decay that attracts
masterful robbers, as shimmering Heavenly images, poets:
   emptiness draws men in,
                                                vacuums them up with the dust.

Published in The Plains Poetry Journal



The Saints

What do we mean by the sweet saints, singing at peace in the Heavens,
  free of our curse, old age?
                                                Men in the Ages of Gold--
can it be true that they lived for a long time? Maybe it only
  seemed long. What if they aged
                                                          rapidly, happy to die?
Then to themselves they would live long, seemingly almost forever.
  If they had perfectly lived,
                                                 wouldn't they willingly die,
just when the slightest decrepitude told them the party was waning?
  Only unsatisfied guests
                                             hate to relinquish the feast,
lingering overexcited, like children refusing their bedtime,
  having experienced too
                                            much for the day to absorb,
so they are querulous now for the unfelt toys that escaped them.
  Greed and unsatisfied lusts
                                                   give me my terror of death.
Shy Amazonian Indians don't live long by our standards
  and, as a rule, by their mid
                                                  thirties they're tired of life--
which in their tropical jungle is placid, desireless, easy--
  and, when their prime's past, die
                                                            painlessly as they were born.
Civilized people, describing them, find this tendency shocking;
  what is it, though, but a true
                                                     image of Heavenly bliss?
Living forever: what's that but to live for as long as you want to?
  Surely our clinging to life
                                                catches this agony, age.
When we are freed from desires, than we, too, climb into Heaven,
  we, too, live as the old
                                           Patriarchs did, without age.

from Pygmies and Pyramids  by Richard Moore
originally published in Sewanee Review

Please click here to read a book review of Richard Moore's Buttoned Into History, reviewed by Eleanor Goodman.