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Three
Poems
by
George Moore
The
Language of Heaven
Like
rich wheat in western fields before a tornado mowing
the
impossible seeds into a fury of absolute airlessness,
movement
all in destruction and brilliance, carrying the day
into
its death at noon, clouds as curious as horses at
barbwire
approaching
the wind with suspicion and gravity, with care
separated
from all other concerns but this, ripeness, absence,
a
falling into that same day, without settling, without sight,
only
the dust rolling itself into devils of wane belief,
waiting
the snap of the trees where there are trees
and
the particled stillness after.
A
crowd watches in desperation as the house rises up
into
the mouth of the wind, not wind but a wild screaming
tongue
of black sky, anchored to each other as birds circle
and
are fed up into the stream of fingers at mad vibrato,
and
I stand there only among dead bits of barn and corrugated
tin,
dazed
by the sudden fleshiness of my own weak tentacle of earth,
ships
of open land erupting into flames of dark air, ears
pinned
to the pressure of loves torn through by a scratch
of
nature, butterflies and bees in speckled patterns
on
the pavement at my feet.
You
were among the remnants of timber, the pots and rags,
guts
of wood and fragmented enamel, singing the death song
of
some last bird, hawk, jay, transformed by the resulting
fires
into
a sacrifice, the aftermath of all we ever thought to have
twisted
like nervous stalks, stripped clean like our commitment
to
that farm, its ears shattered and bled rich as
disappearing
dressings
of soil, the animals anchored finally in fear in their
last
steps, sleeping beneath the weight of counties, unreachable
with
your hair in mimic of the seconds allotted for memory,
and
no one to recover from the sickness of first calm.
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Echo
Cliffs
Marble
Canyon on the Paria Plateau,
the
Navajo sell their silver overlooking
the
great fall. The red desert of the Colorado
at
Lee's Ferry and Navajo Bridge.
True
mongers come from the other side
of
the sun, where water is sacred
even
when the river gives up only mud.
Hot
shot down the canyon wall and across.
The
descend Dantean for the literati
but
close and dry for the native hawks
that
spur a failing glottophagy. A hunger
to
devour all this landscape's language.
The
harsh reality at this time of year
and
weather. But then the highway
makes
it aimless, and orange moving
toward
magenta. The traders catch a glint
as
silver says more than a thousand
storms,
a mirroring of thirsty distances
when
we come back to cultivated sands
surrounded
with living echoes.
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Illuminati
For
La Beata de Piedrahita
there
was a moment when she knew the irons of the Inquisition
might
reach her. There was the darkness these men
perpetuated,
she
thought, and now I shall succumb. But among her
patrons
and
believers, she prized the fearful and a few with power
enough
to keep her heresy from public eyes
and
to save her from the Tombs. But few knew
she'd
spoken with the Virgin, and this was enough, she felt,
to
secure her place wherever they might send her.
In
Salamanca, in the household of her father,
who
left each morning in his bondage to the builders,
labored
for the Lord, in his way, by carrying stone
for
the Church, she would wake to the suddenness of twilight
and
not know if it were day at all, but perhaps some
filtered
moment of her own forthcoming. Still as
the
small house was with her father gone,
it
was a sentence she knew she must live with.
She
felt the worlds rub close together and nothing
more
for this one could be done.
It
was not the forms of darkness, the alumbrados
and
their Gnostic sources, but those others, hidden
for
what must have seemed forever, who found
in
her voice the bridge to God’s syllables, a light of
itself
splendiferous,
congealing. She held council with the Lord
they
told their judges, and so would know the ends of these
inquiries
into
the true faith. She would have given herself up
to
whatever forces, for they were small, and limited to
the
temporal. While others burned, and few, at the
instant
of
the fire, would say more than that they corresponded,
she
reached for the light ambered in the flames.
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