George Moore

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021

The Island

George Moore

The sea is scratched glass and in turn it scratches glass and knees

the sea some monstrous beginning always beginning again and I am

not use to it this deep wood at its edge like an ingrown wall of trees

I am more the mountain ruach calling from an outcropping above timberline

seeing all the way across a day’s walk west and feeling empty in an airless home

But the islands are out there just beyond this rumbling edge

An old Orthodox woman all in black sits on a garden wall

and pulls the skin from a rabbit in a single jerk and holds it up an offering

to her unknown god or the space she fills But mine are the gods of infinite surmise

the echoes off crowns of snowy peaks the emptiness of canyons crying back

I am never an island or the sea surrounding it where the fishermen go out

in their damaged boats on glass and the winds deny them peace

and they haul their traps in nightly dreams and they live through that another season

No I am the island that is unseen a foot in the sand one on a foreign peak

I am the rabbit a single moment before the gods tell us to wait

George Moore’s poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, North American Review, Colorado Review, Orion, Arc, Tipton Poetry Journal and Stand. His most recent collections are Children's Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FurureCycle 2016). He is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and finalist for The National Poetry Series. His work was recently shortlisted for the Bailieborough Poetry Prize and long-listed for both the Gregory O'Donoghue and Ginkgo Poetry Prizes. Retired from the University of Colorado, Boulder, he lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia.