Two Poems
by Goerge Moore
Animal World
The culturally constructed aesthetic ideal of the natural landscape
can never be preserved because the dynamism of ecological processes defies preservation.
R.P. Neumann
Things change, surely: you watch
them douse a whale in the surf,
bucket by bucket like firemen
out to save a child.
And I think at twelve
I watched Animal World,
men in canoes hunting an elusive alligator
and the world changing
slow in its currents
until suddenly,
the gators slap their tails
in the shadows of a draining swamp.
My neighbors, wolves,
wrestle with their closeness to the suburbs:
the one I raised refusing me,
loved me enough, ran
until he fell unfaltering in his tracks.
What is it in our everyday
that dwindles and dries up,
that gets blown to smithereens,
gets curled to butter
black with death?
Those bears on our hill
pull down birdfeeders each spring
like ornaments off a Christmas tree.
And this morning, a Mbojo lioness
catches three Maasai children
hunting cattle, and the cattle
wander home alone.
Watching the Seals
on rockweed beds, covered rocks
the sun crisps up cool in October,
those light bodies, horns curled
like Gabriel’s creatures blowing
the coming, basking curved into the air,
the rocks no wider than footstools.
And it seems all time might be reduced
to this sunning display on a cool day,
reduced, refined to a moment’s reprieve,
the warmth feeding us all.
The fishermen often treat them like thieves,
kill them when no one is looking.
But secretly we all see them as dark spirits,
taking their names from the oceans’ histories,
skirting other worlds of vast distances.
The seals were the signs of such eternity,
coming and going from the underworld,
in curiosity and abundance, Proteus
and selkie, and herdsmen, spirits and links
to the survival we now crave.
I have spent a good deal of my life traveling, from early studies in Eastern Europe to a year in India and Afghanistan. I taught literature and writing with the University of Colorado, Boulder, for many years, and now live on the south shore of Nova Scotia in Canada. I have six poetry collections out, Children's Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry, 2015) one of the most recent. My poetry as appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, and elsewhere.