Two Poems: Mary B. Moore
no account
Midsummer cicadas, bee-shaped and supersized, bumble-fly by, and swifts soar and dive and say teeter or twitter. Hash tags and hyper-abbreviated accounts are in the air––deaths, politics, lies, and counter-lies. It’s lively here. My mom liked to say people were “no account,” which meant she’d ignore whatever they said––her half-sister, my dad, the fussy neighbor. “Fool” she called me. I can’t remember why. Maybe she guessed I’d be me. And I believed her: she was Mom after all. Lady God. The cicadas start up their weird again: cycles of sizzle, pause, sizzle: unlovely, mechanical, head-achy––wind-up toys, keyed too tight. The pin oak stutters different rhythms; the too-long, skewed stars glint on off, on off, while afternoon slow-builds cloud, an ice-crystal dome––a temple or mosque of vapor––eternal as we are. Mom is ash and bone shards now. I dreamed I poured her into that hollow oak I like. She dusted the bole’s opening, shaped like a key-hole. In the new dimension, she travels the roots’ veins, respirates, turns to air––I breathe her awareness. She left no will, no account to carve a stone, no obit, though who’d choose to be captioned on a stone anyway? The crows wouldn’t. They startle me, one near, one far, call and response––crow church, its hymnal loud, a bit alarming, as if caw could cow me. Mother could. I painted her once,
B. MOORE
too big, Mrs. Big. Her hand was huge, a state, Alabama, West Virginia, pink and white like the word lady-bird. I’d handed her my eyes and ears on a plate, you see, and she took them and told me what I was and saw. Now she’s still opaque, oblique. Here’s this door made of words. Maybe the barn owl will visit her keyhole, lunar face a Medieval saint’s. We all know the call, harrowing and melodic, an alto flute note, not quite a dove’s cool cool, but a query: You? Is it you?
Zero, A Biography, Or How Nothing Comes of Nothing
Fool: “Canst thou make no use of nothing, nuncle?”
King Lear: “Why no fool, Nothing can come of nothing.”
Fool: “Give me an egg and I’ll give thee two crowns. . . .
Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away.”
Fool: Riddle me this: why do colons start my lines? Two blind pupils
stacked, or black apples mourning. I wandered Lear’s orchards and stole the red ones; five bumps round the stems nipple them.
(Where’s mother?
Not here, not there.)
* Cordelia liked to riddle. When is zero none? When nuns go AWOL. When does the heath owl’s who turn to howl? When Kings turn to scowl and steal wisdom from Fools.
*
—King
Lear
Good Cordelia, exiled for honesty: after blind Lear said
“Nothing comes of nothing,” he ceded the mean-girl sisters
land, rule and all. Was he senile when he gave his gold
crown away? Bald, he looked like a scalded egg.
The two Queens Cruel exiled him to storm in the wild,
I, his entourage. Was it rain that streaked and burned my face in the cold?
*
“Poor Tom’s a’cold,” said the Bedlamite on the heath. What do the two
alms’ bowls in poor hold? Nothing’s rain. An icicle clinks from Tom’s hut; the night shines through it like ink. Look: it’s shaped like the 1
Lear was, and the pen he signed himself away with. It melts in the hand. *
There is no one without none, n’uncle. Though O is not 0, it’s close.
We mouthe only vowels when we’re born, ah and oh and ow without the lips’ closure––we are born so open. Awe and anguish are the first language.
*
And where was Cordelia’s mother? She’s kin to the nothing about which Much Ado is made, to the void Hamlet thinks should lie between a maiden’s legs.
*
What comes from the Oh between a mother’s legs? The zeros we all are. We redden and squall while breath and blood fill us and we crawl the world egg marbled blue and white like Queen
MARY B. MOORE
Heaven’s cloak in Church art. The stars’ yolks blaze into halos,
then fade. Already, they’re almost naught. Wonder is we’re begot at all.
Null is the mother god, our skulls’ little apertures, her signature.