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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So Be It
If the neighbor’s roof is a shamble of broken tiles, so be it.
If those tiles sit there for weeks. If no one does a thing about them.
If the sky is gray day after day and then snow falls and the tiles turn into
fragments of a broken alphabet traced in snow, clinging.
Darkness, then dawn.
If beauty, as hoped for; if death as promised.
There is no reason not to say it: the woman with her head bent, reading, is
beautiful.
2018
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
2018
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
2022