Aran Islands
There’s a thread of water behind the ferry,
a line so thin yet taut the bow seems strung,
well, like a bow. And there, I’ve done it again,
left the page for some sound, a bird down
the waterfront, or a rock falling. I’m ferried
across the spring of a year decades ago,
that thread of a wake a gentle rope
on a poor monk’s robe, raw white water trailing
Irish Sea somehow sutures me into the moment.
And whether or not Aran was part
of the Irish north my great grandfather
turned in the soil, it feels like home,
the narrow rocky fields, drystone fencing
leading up a gentle hill to the old fort.
At Dún Aonghasa there’s no one that day
some years ago, and I stand alone on the stark edge
in a semi-circle of fortress stone, a reverberation,
a kind of echo, compressed with rarefactions,
where the island’s history at this distant point returns
through the ocean’s crashing far below. I know
no names but imagine children playing at this edge,
the surf beating black granite three hundred beneath,
and wonder how long I have to live. That fort,
this fort, that edge of the world,
that day some years ago like a map or lifeline
remains a kind of question, its own edge, precipice,
following me to ask this again and again
of the stillness in the center of another fury,
not unlike great grandfather’s abandoned plot of potatoes
for a new world, suddenly on the bow of a ship
just coming into the harbour, trailing white water
and a life, asking what more we will wake to
before we are done traversing.
Two Owls
In the woods off Emma Lake,
farther north than I’d ever been,
two owls concert an evening song
of Saskatchewan, two hooters
cruising the lodgepole pine
as I stand on a broken porch
alone in the spring. Coming in
from two directions a half mile off
I hear them, solitary hooters
each soundless evening, closing in
on the point where I stand
on that porch, thinking.
The canopy of branchless pines,
a ruined colosseum; clergy,
warriors, lovers, dark shadows
swooping together in an instant,
riding like lancers to a familiar union,
and the wordless pleasure
for an emperor of empty evenings,
surveying the forest from his porch.
A sudden meeting of distant things,
days, weeks, the faces of evenings,
flights, and hunger, swooping fears;
a borrowing of those wings, words,
deep solo hoots of familiar greeting,
beckoning, carving bonds, signatures,
on the edge of the wilderness,
racing to meet at an augured center,
the light just dying in the trees, catching
the edge of a wing, three, each to each.
George Moore is the author of six collections of poems, including Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (Future Cycle 2016). He was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and has received nine Pushcart Prizes. His poems appear in New York Quarterly, North American Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, Orion and Stand. He taught literature and writing at University of Colorado, Boulder, and now lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia.