Daniel Edward Moore, In Absentia and other poems

1.

The pear tree violently bloomed. Green and white faces a thousand smiles strong gazed down at the woman shading charcoal cups onto paper thin as her thoughts. On the dining room table she managed denial of the house become kennel and curse.

2.

Leave it the way you found it, we asked. Request evaporated into dark expectation. The black and white cup held nothing of promise. Arriving home found justice dried quickly. Blue ink on a check with the name in the middle left the way we found it.

3.

The birds across Main Street in Lake Ornithology did what they could to remind. Mirroring back from an intimate space, the movement of wings and the opening of beaks. Beauty can live in all the world’s rooms, even the shallow, wet and neglected.

4.

For them, the most mindful of us being gone, we clapped our way back to the seats in their hearts. Applauding how vulnerable the mindful survive. Their barking became a long lamentation holding us there on tomorrow’s dry tongue. We became righteous oases.

GDJ, rejon

Being free of my own observation, the mind untwisting, releasing me back to the hands of the world.

Is this the part about waking up slow, about consciousness coming to town in a tent with an old man screaming revival?

Is this why Saturday dreams of a body minus the neon blue of distraction, minus the copy, cut and paste of everything separate and sad?

Opening my eyes to the essence of rest over acres of green, waiting for the word good to be breathed by lungs that held the dark so long

it forgot it was free to go. This is my lover Sabbath. Notice how she calms the sea that is anything but dead. Notice my eyes turning black to blue, the luminous shade of Sunday.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Oak Harbor, Washington, on Whidbey Island. New poems are forthcoming in Cultural Weekly, Tule Review, Poetry South, January Review, Plainsongs, The American Journal of Poetry, Gyroscope Review, and others. His chapbook, Boys, was recently released from Duck Lake Books, and his first book, Waxing the Dents, was a finalist for the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize and will be released in February 2020. Visit him at DanielEdwardMoore.com.