Epitaph
He stole forsythia.
He lived for love.
He never got caught.
Copyright © 2014 Jim Moore. This poem originally appeared in Underground: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2014). Used with permission of the author.
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The Need Is So Great
Sometimes I just sit like this at the window and watch
the darkness come. If I’m smart, I’ll put on Bach.
I’m thinking now of how far it always seems there is to go.
Maybe it is too easy that I speak so often
of late last light on a December day,
of that stubborn grass that somehow still remains green
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Love in the Ruins
1
I remember my mother toward the end,
folding the tablecloth after dinner
so carefully,
as if it were the flag
of a country that no longer existed,
but once had ruled the world.
2
7 A.M. and the barefoot man
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I Call It Joy
this being unnoticed. Sitting like this
next to the stone lamb outside the Cathedral.
My lost soul, which prefers the stone lamb
to the living God. Prefers these deep shadows
to the summer day. The way he took me
all those years ago, shattered me
so that fifty-seven years later, I might sit
next to the smoothness of this stone lamb,
know the stone joy of being unnoticed.
People go in the Cathedral all day long,
visiting their God on their knees.2018