Nancy Carol Moody — The Poems

ITEM FOUND IN A DRESSER DRAWER

A watch,
left by my mother and broken--
as were her all.

(She kept the jeweler in business for years.)

She would do the same
with mine—break them, that is--

wrapping my newest timepiece
on her wrist on Christmas
or birthday mornings, the bright

hands stalling, fixing the instant.

Halted time tucked gleaming
back into the velvet-

lidded box until the repair
shop opened
for business the next day.

I thought

that was the only death in her,
my soft mother, killer

of watches. Pocket, wrist, locket--
she could stop them all.
But beneath,

neither in ticker nor muscle,
rocked in the sling of breast-flesh,

another sort of chronometer loomed.

How slight a movement
of one hand
would it have taken to admit

the lump when it was new
as a stopwatch, pristine

in its pouch and still under warranty.
But no--

by then she had grown
accustomed to it, you see.
The box.

Its snapped-closed lid.

REINCARNATION

To come back
(to have come back)

as something kinder

would be
(would have been)

a kindness.

Blue glass dish for the finches
to splash in.

Middle C ribboning through a din.

And still I cannot cross the plains
without seeing on every barbed fence

a boy tied there.

Headlamp newly on or soon to be
flicked off.

Next time will be moths.

A mausoleum untended
is seepage.

Sometimes to melt is the only way out.

Let there be one tool precisely milled
for the doing. Or undoing.

To return as apple.
To bleed nothing but clear juice.

TABLECLOTH

You know that old trick--
grasping one edge

and jerking it so fast and clean

that the plates
and glasses remain in place,

just an afterthought

of shimmer
left to record the stun.

We think of it as magic,

but what hasn't been yanked
from beneath us--

and still we're left standing.

BOX OF ROCKS

Halfway beneath a table,
lid torn back,
$2 scrawled in black marker on the side,

these yard-sale rocks, heavy
as regret.

Two dollars, the price of an accumulation.

Scumbled with mud, collaged
in dry leaf, bits
of cobweb, the lost wings of insects,

they glint
like old loves, rugged stars.

They too had lives once,

arrived in this unlikely place
because someone spotted a moon in them

because a hand reached out and said, You.

O to have been the one chosen,
the hurried heartbeat of that.

Dimple, curvature, an angle
of polish. An arm that curled itself
around our shape,

and in its closing became our shape.

To have come through the tumbling.
And then, this hardness

we were shouldered into, the dismal
weight of us.

Lid folded down,
the cardboard darkness,

our hearts ticking, one against another.

AJAR

A door open slightly
inside a house where nobody's home.

No malevolence
intended: this is not about ghosts
or screaming

birds of prey or everything I ever regretted

returning to skim the skate pond
with glissandos of ice.

It's just that there's an order to things—

who fills the feeder
by spilling seed on the ground?
poisons the fish then drags out the seine?

One can argue the logic
of growing melons in the shape of cubes

so no space is wasted in the shipping.

But consider the cost.
Not to mention the rot when the flatbed collapses
under the weight

of all that conformity.

A vacuum leaves tracks in the carpet
saying I was here and this is what I needed to do.

Like this door, ajar. Yet another closed behind it.

What we keep hidden.
The gape we leave for it to slip through.

IN THE BEGINNING

Apple, tell me
your name.

Spell it with alphabets
I can imagine.

Hand signs will do,
those flapping wings,

bluster a verb
I long to bite into.

Oxidation burns
only part of the story.

Allow me a slice
beyond your skin,

bitter, bursting
with flesh.

WHEN THEY ASK ABOUT MY FACE

I will say something
about snow, the skittered tracks
of a hare just prior to the hush

I will say wind bores
salt into sea-boards,
taut rope burns a furrow,
leaf-rust in spring autumns elms

Hoarfrost bit by hob nail
meadow after the scythe
the dory's barnacled hull

a peppermint held
too long against the palate

When they ask about my face,
I will say that even a trodden carriage
leaves wheelmarks in the stone,
that shrapnel can flare
a staggering tattoo,

that left to their own devices,
sparks of midnight fireworks
will carve ferocious trails
into the black wax of the sky

THE CHERRIES AT TIFFANY'S

The plastic cherries
near the drug store entrance
look so real

that the clerk tells us
about the children
who come in, so taken

with what seems genuine
that they dip their hands
instinctively in the bowl,

lift their faces and hold
the dazzling fruit
to their mouths.

Such lustrous deception--
red layered upon deeper
red, occasional flecks

like sparks flaring,
the thin stem a complex
of green-woven filaments,

a fibrous braid of grass,
beckoning. Who wouldn't
be seduced by this gleam

and polish? These cherries,
small charmers, are such
cunning imposters that

even we, soft and jowly
from middle age, jaded
by a lifetime of gimmickry

and artifice, cannot resist
the impulse to reach
into the bowl and disprove

the illusion, our hopeful
fingers hungry for the small
and tender heft, the delicious

resistance of the flesh.

CIRCUMSCRIPTION
                  Confused Sea Turtles March into Restaurant
                          — Rome (Reuters, August 19, 2008)

The moon angles in
     from an odd degree,
          and the hatchlings,

instinct their only
     context, ferry their new
          armor toward shimmer

and gleam, light an emollient
     of liquid vibrato
          runneling the surface

of this black world.
     What do the turtles
          understand of water,

their unseasoned flippers
     all grasp and scatter
          as they scuff their way

across the sand, the line
     dividing earth from sea
          indiscernible beneath

the night sky's nebulous
     swirl? How can they
          make one single thing

of this august moon,
     blazing disc of ice both
          out there and elsewhere,

nothing but primordial
     breath to bargain
          the space between?

It's not bewilder
     that draws them into
          this misconstrued light;

it's all seduction: thrum
     of blue neon pulsing
          above the café door,

shivers of candlelight
     refracting through
          the windowglass,

the chrome and glisten
     of tablescapes. Electrics
          masquerade

as element, afterimage
     postures as unbounded
          brilliance. And the turtles--

hapless, euphoric--
     trundle headlong into
          this treacherous bright:

the gloss and polish
     of the dining room floor
          beckoning like moonshine

enkindling the sea, chandeliered
     starlight reflecting
          in a drowning pool.

SEXTANT

There,
she said,
when I kissed her
northeast.
I had been headed
south.

Once,
celestial bodies
were sighted
on the horizon.

Once,
it had been believed
that the stars
were enough.

ZORSE
         Future zorses will combine the speed
         and savvy of zebras with the friendliness
         of horses --Associated Press

They’re doing it
in the mountains.
The woman’s spent
years courting
the zebra—handled him
since the day he came
out. Now she orders
the lights stay up. Muzak
be piped into the barn.
When the mood is just
right, she fires him into
mounting the mare, tricks
his semen to the jar
in her hand. Fifteen-
hundred bucks a shot.
Orders come
from as far as France.
I imagine it
happening in early morning: the summit
in blue shadow, sun zig-zagging
crazily through abandoned lifts.
Lupines scream. Seedlings
explode, sudden as mines.
The melt is high and
the lake is full. Water
flees the paunched
lips of the dam, hollers
down the mountainside
where further along, Girl
Scouts in tents and mummy-
bags stretch the soreness
of rocks from their bones,
remembering: a night of
charred dogs and S’mores,
blushed secrets and songs,
the discord of nature
just outside a fire-
ring of stones.

EROS

Pallor of ash, homely as a potato,
the asteroid named Eros tumbles
end-over-end in its loopy orbit
around the sun. For a year

a space probe, flimsy cylinder
of foil and shields, has been courting
the rock, making its passes, circling
closer, spawning photos it sends

one hundred ninety-six million
miles to Earth. But now the probe’s
batteries are running down, the satellite
spent beyond usefulness. Two day

short of Valentine’s, it makes the plunge
to the rock’s cratered surface where,
despite all predictions and the uncertain
perils of proximity, the probe continues

its lonely habit, the camera shuttering
glimpses of a geography unfathomed.
Marooned on the lovely and windless
plains of Eros, unable to align its panels

to the sun, the probe at best can survive
a month before its snapshots dim
finally into dusk, that delicate, moonlit
darkness where honeymoons begin.

A HISTORY OF FLIGHT

Of course they used ungodly words, those two
Wright boys—no contraption ever works the first
time out. They measured and considered, pursed
their lips and scratched their heads. When they first flew

their gliders, had they really thought it through,
the ultimatums of success—the thirst
for power beyond wind? Or that some would curse
as heathen acts their flights of derring-do?

But God, who hadn’t been so popular
in years, was thrilled to host these guys with guts
enough to fly in the face of gravity.
He let them rise, watched them through binoculars--

they looked a lot more fun than celibates.
Why should He mind their little blasphemies?

© Nancy Carol Moody
A HISTORY OF FLIGHT first appeared
as "The History of Flight" in
Talking River Review, Summer, 2002

NESTING

June, and the insatiable starlings
just outside our bedroom window
are raising their second batch
of babies this season, rackety
blusterers tucked into the eaves
of the house next door.

Mornings at sunup, the nest
is a tumult of appetite
and squawk. Evenings,
in the melancholy low-light
of the just-set sun, the drama
recycles: cacophony, then a quiet.

The outcome is not so different
from the creation: how the light
turns and a hunger rises.
Sound becomes us, and then
there is the silence.

© Nancy Carol Moody
NESTING first appeared in
Photograph With Girls (Traprock Books, 2009)
and was reprinted in Jefferson Monthly, March, 2012

IN A WORD

Imagine a chair.
It might have a tall back,
curvaceous legs, a red,
come-hither cushion. You see
her, don't you? Not
a chair any longer. How

did that happen? How
could a simple chair
be transformed so completely, not
in a day, but in a breath? Back
up. Let's look at that. See
it now, the chair. Blood-red,

hard-cast steel, thick rods
to shape its spine, how
the seat is like stone. Can you see
the difference? This chair,
its indifferent eye, stares back
at you, pressing, yet not

quite pressing a large knot
deep into your gut, the red-
black clot of you pressing back,
and you not grasping how
all of this just happened. The chair,
after all, is just a chair—a sea

change, isn't it? So you see,
what they say is true: You are not
invulnerable. A simple chair
has entered you. It has read
your mind, your beastly heart. How
weak you are proved to be, back-

stabbed by language, at the beck
and call of simple words. See
how an image can hold you, how
you are not immune? You are not
any more to language than red
meat. Word bait. That chair

up there was not ever yours. Go back
to the top, start with the red. See
again the chair. Ask yourself how.