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Overview
"Jim Moore writes of history, of love, of pain, of the intimate revelations of a consciousness alive to itself." —C. K. Williams
"It's coming so fast,"
says an old woman across from me,
speaking to no one in particular:
she nods her head in agreement with herself
and strictly speaking
who can argue with her? —from "Underground"
Jim Moore's first career retrospective shows a poet whittling down experience to its essential confrontation with one's own limitations, whether it be time running short, or understanding running thin, or capacity to think or feel or love enough running low. Underground gathers the best poems from Moore's seven previous books and includes twenty new poems. This is the definitive volume by a poet of great depth and generosity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555973469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 09/02/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jim Moore is the author of seven books of poetry, including Invisible Strings and Lightning at Dinner. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Paris Review. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Spoleto, Italy.
Read an Excerpt
Underground
New and Selected Poems
By Jim Moore
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2014 Jim MooreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-346-9
CHAPTER 1
TWO FLUTE SONGS
1
I want to become thin as a flute song
which goes into the delicate inner ear
and coils there, holding in balance the lives
of everyone I love.
2
It's late and the furnace goes full blast
filling the room like a good joke.
I read aloud, pausing for rain.
If my pipe were alive
I could not hold it more lovingly.
Soon, I will make green tea
and pray that the flute song I barely hear
is not a signal for dawn
and is not a record, nor an answer
to any questions I might pose it.
WOLF
1
The wolf always comes at the last moment,
alone. He is never full,
you never can throw him enough bones.
When I see a wolf, even a photograph,
I shiver.
Something taut and frozen inside me wants to stretch on and on;
winter river, glint after glint stretched out under the sun.
2
This is the wolf:
what is left when you've tried to throw everything away.
Part of him lives in the city
where people stand in record stores at midnight
and move through the stacks,
their hands stumbling, confused,
abandoned, expected to make their way ...
3
To find the wolf
look at anything wary, anything falling down.
That old woman on West Seventh
directing traffic with a torn branch,
the tree all twisted from growing between apartment houses.
Or the time I lifted the garbage can lid
finding the flowers
from when the baby downstairs died,
turned on their side in the bottom of the can;
bright yellow, still growing in the darkness.
AT THE LAUNDROMAT
I sat at the very end of the laundromat,
so old there wasn't even Muzak, no shiny pink washing machines,
the ceiling full of peeling paint like a book with its pages burned.
My eyes felt thick, my sight poured out of me in columns, focused,
I saw, say "saw" slowly three times and you will feel the odd heft of this vision:
saw, saw, saw,
the way I felt my third night out of prison when we walked through a stubble field
to the river I had never seen by daylight and sat there
in the cool October night, the river below us down a steep bank,
sat there watching the blackness for many minutes,
felt the black motion of my own heavy body for the first time in ten months
and in that laundromat the blackness came again, everything there
heavy with use, the huge ceiling fan encrusted with dirt, each blade thick with it
and at the other end the short man in the green shirt who ran the place,
one of those puke green knit shirts buttoned to the top,
he sorted laundry, slowly, very slowly, taking each piece out of the dryers,
shaking it once, holding it to the light, shaking it again,
then (if it were coat or shirt) lifting it to his nose
and smelling the armpits, smelling each one carefully
and finally hanging them in a long row ready for pickup.
It was late, almost 10 P.M., and he called out to another laundromat.
At first he seemed happy, then angry as he complained bitterly,
how they hadn't cleaned the machines,
how he would shake them up good soon, how they listened to the radio—
no more radios! — it was quarter to ten and they still had time to do the windows.
My whole body then was with his body, I felt the rising anger in us both,
heavy, weighted, each in our clumsy bodies. I could feel
the pull of him, as if dragging me across the dance floor,
teaching me a new step, no
future, no future, our hands sunk to the elbows in soap,
twisting shirts into rags, sinking the rags one by one,
cleaning the dry grains of soap off the table tops for the last time,
removing the thumb prints from the plate glass,
pulling back the tab on the cash register, making the room black.
THE HISTORY OF ROSES
7 A.M. first frost, the nurse who works all night
walks home, feet splayed gingerly in two directions.
Last night the old man who sells papers by day and flowers by night
sold us roses, five for a dollar. And the world
sways a little on its stem at how people have to shuffle to survive.
And now there are roses on your desk, concentrated slices of dawn,
darkened, folded into layers, veined and bunched together,
coil of soft petals above the delicate green leaves.
And the history of roses is the history of the work whistle,
the florist for whom the holidays are a nightmare,
whose children are asleep by the time he's home Christmas Eve,
who stands alone in the kitchen he remodeled and eats a dish of ice cream
before he goes to bed: he is still young when his first heart attack comes.
There is no end to the history of roses, to blooming and quiet,
to what withers and returns. All knowledge hurts:
and when we walk out of a theater and buy roses
there have to be tears and oceans and blind trust
in the clot of a dark red substance on the end of a cut stem.
RESOLUTIONS
This year I'll be a hair shirt in reverse,
teeth on fruit and a tongue in the secret places,
a psalm in the face of my enemies,
the nail that works loose from every theory,
two steps toward whatever moves,
a cool basement for my goat to play in,
and this year I'll take ten fingers
and write slowly of the prisons,
no sadness will be spared,
no cell forgotten,
and every day I'll remember
the length of each convict's body.
I'll remember the new year is everywhere,
even behind those bars,
and join my friends in the tunnels
where in spite of everything
Terry danced a jig once and I watched
and I think I'll bathe in the sea
and let no more than a little salt water
separate Terry and me.
COMING BACK FOR HELP
for Tom McGrath
We have all the poems about darkness and hidden water,
sad attempts to take us away from ourselves,
to find the boats
without captains that will return us to the sea,
will float us into perfection,
perfect sailors of the unconscious.
Is solitude so bleak?
Do we become perfect as we strip our lives of affection,
is snow blindness the final absolution?
It is winter now in Saint Paul. I am alone,
I love my teacup with its bird under the curved flower,
the way sunlight illuminates the little clouds of dust-hair in my room
and in the evening the sound of a radio floats in from down the street,
the voice of the announcer sad in its forced intensity.
Voice,
they would give you a funeral at sea,
but you'll come back,
message scribbled in a bottle
crying for help
because we always do,
no matter how we long
to finger
the stone harp of purity
in the coldest water
of the most inhuman ocean.
MUSIC
for Meridel LeSueur
1
The cold egg of the snow cracks open,
broadens into chunks of fog.
10 A.M. and the street corner is invisible.
I turn on the electric heater, listen to Casals,
watch the branches like thin asparagus stalks
shrouded and growing under water.
Something lives here bigger than my skin,
larger even than the old man Pablo bent over his bow,
the old man Pablo brushing his quick strokes on paper,
the old man Pablo writing his last poem from a hospital bed.
At the trial they are talking about death.
The old Indians have faces that crease in all directions,
crisscrossed patches of flesh, long black hair.
Hundreds are indicted.
The young prosecutor wears a sweater under his jacket to keep off the cold.
And the deaths at Wounded Knee hover somewhere in that dark fog.
Nothing is lost,
nothing disappears. The murders dissolve and then re-form into something new.
2
Night now.
Quarter moon behind trees.
Down the block the yellow-lemon light is always there.
At sunset the last of the fog was caught, pink, like a glaze separated from its pot.
Today in Spain two anarchists from the mountains garroted:
a leather collar with a nail sticking out is placed around the neck and tightened.
The moon clears the trees now and hangs free in the sky, bodiless.
3
Three days ago I bought a Zuni bracelet, thought about it
a long time, wore it around the shop and shook my wrist like a dancer
trying on new shoes. There are small pieces of turquoise and coral,
bits of the mastodon world like a speck caught in the eye.
Vision of the small, tears from another culture set in silver.
The silver in the bracelet shivers in sunlight, glows in candlelight;
a white arc of music for the eye,
vibrations scattered like small campfires along a beach.
I see cello
phosphorescence, curved fingers along the bow,
an old man's notations thrown back over his shoulder.
AT 7 A.M., WATCHING THE CARS ON THE BRIDGE
Everybody's going to work. Well,
not me. I'm not
going to work.
HOW TO CLOSE THE GREAT DISTANCE BETWEEN PEOPLE
Do it over coffee,
like fish that appear to be talking,
but are really eating to stay alive.
SUNSET
1
The sun spins off into its last corner
down by the steel webbing that supports water towers,
down every stalk, into the stones with their layers of blackness,
giving breath to dust and blood to loneliness.
A kite string breaks,
the kite floats like a detached wing, single wing-tip
through the narrowing band of light, high
over Applebaum's neon sign,
away into the valley, over the curve of the small houses in the Czech neighborhood.
All falls down.
Light glitters along the frozen edges of the turnpike.
Chromatic dismembering,
totally alone in the changing scales of light
like a small boy standing in the dusk of his parents' bedroom.
Downstairs the babysitter watches TV. The boy stands by his father's bureau
and sees the familiar neighborhood go dark, sees the trees
on Reising's hill, their branches like huge nests in the last light.
Children in the dusk.
The last line of carelessness,
jump ropes cutting a floating erratic arc in the purple sky.
Their voices rise,
human voice mist, a silver casualness
thrown back into the dark.
2
What hides behind the dusk?
Light-sluice from another world,
down there at the end of the west-facing block,
only orange shards point the way, cairns on the journey
to the looming mountains, the blackness beyond tree line,
larger than an open mouth, as large as the turtle's journey
as he drags through the wet sand to the river.
The fading light is inside you.
All the times you have been alone rise from the blood,
the orange wisps of solitude swirling around inside;
light lifts off the earth, finished;
everything finished.
A lone swing in the park.
Cold metal chains and a wooden seat.
The skin listens for its forests
as your feet scrape along the scooped-out dust under you.
You push up and out in the metal-squeaking dusk,
farther and farther out, parallel with the tops of trees.
You long for something friendly,
peer into the swinging disappearing earth
like a duck flying north
toward the long-absent marsh, the swerve back into earth
waters.
TRAPPED
1
We drink wine,
sleep in the sun and look at the blue smear of the river far beneath us.
Later, I walk past the edge of town,
out along a country road where red-winged blackbirds live.
An old man is putting in a garden.
He has gone in for lunch
and planted one glove each on two sticks of his picket fence
and his hat on a third.
My hands are balled into fists
like the woman in the blue coat
walking so purposively,
her hands pointed straight out before her,
as if she were blind,
stumbling through the thickets of air.
Back in the city, spring multiplies in a drunkenness of mud and water,
the houses with high fences like barbed wire,
sudden whine of a siren turning into a shriek,
the mother who shouts, "OK, fifteen minutes!"
The mother who shouts, "Now!"
Sometimes five senses are not enough,
not enough cups to catch the rain,
the bodiless voices from open windows,
wind shifts,
new grass cracking open the dead earth.
2
Walking the prison yard on the first spring night
Doug said, "Remember street lights,
how they cast a shadow?"
We looked past the old wooden gun tower
to the Missouri fields
ploughed into the blackness; and there too, the red-winged blackbirds
flinging themselves against the last light
beyond the prison glare,
almost brushing the fields
as if they were a second, wing-tipped, horizon,
moving so fast as to be barely visible.
This is the wilderness beyond the body's last border
where the old man puts on his garden gloves again to grow
fruit in the prison, the world.
SECRETS
for my mother on her birthday
Somewhere at this very moment someone is eating peanut butter right out of the jar! He is alone and the television is off. His mother has no idea what he is doing. It is his secret. Very far away a dog barks, a horn honks. The day his grandmother died he had a crazy desire to laugh and yet he was very sad. You don't tell your mother your secrets for fear she won't love you.
FOR A MOMENT
I stood deep inside a willow and found it better than love.
I saw a willow's heart. It was green and easy to touch.
For a moment I was a willow-animal.
Anyone could touch me deep inside. I was easy to touch.
IN THE NEW WORLD
I am not sad to come back.
The inner world gives me bones —
they form themselves in silence,
they ask no questions.
They dance, they have patience.
They measure the round in years.
When I come back from the bones,
the pure fish that moves in the wind
and that has no desire;
when I come back from the pulse,
from the breath, from the belly
that delights in itself;
when I come back I am not sad.
One by one
I entered the world. The circle
of the world. My friends,
my enemies, all the streams
that needed my weight
to fall inward once again
the falls I became
poised over nothing.
This is why there is no sadness
when I come back, I come back
to this: my friends and I hold hands
in a circle. There was music,
we hurt one another,
our bones called need, our fears
danced before our eyes,
our sex hardened,
there was no more water calling
only salt
on salt.
This is why there is no sadness.
I lick your tears,
your salt writes our names on my tongue,
our rings of salt mean forever.
Ashes cover nothing, sadness is not,
even the salt turns inward
and falls through the sunlight.
They say, oh, the salt, the sea,
but no, it is not that, not happiness,
not sadness.
TODAY'S MEDITATION: "IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO LAST FOREVER"
Cavafy
Every day, and for no apparent reason,
I remember prison. My footlocker,
barbed wire out the window, how coffee tasted —
instant, lukewarm from the bathroom tap
first thing in the morning. I would stand there
sipping, watching the Standard sign through the barred
windows,
miles down the road. I can still see how red
that sign was in the pale sky at dawn, so far away
beyond the fence, and yet near somehow.
I stood next to the shaving mirror,
as close to the sky as I could get.
Even then, I knew how lucky I was
"and I really lived in undivided love."
I understood how the loneliness and the love
would always be mixed up inside me,
like a sky and its Standard sign bound
together in the little nearness of time.
TODAY'S MEDITATION: HAPPINESS
In the end,
all that matters is light and dark,
and what's not finished between them.
As long as he stands back far enough, deeply
enough inside the room, he is fine, he gets
the point of things: how they come, then must go.
But the blue sea beyond the window: it has
always done this to him, always forced him
further into happiness than he thought he could stand to go.
TODAY'S MEDITATION
He went to bed early, and dreamed well.
Wild sex, many secret meetings.
Toward dawn, he woke as usual.
That is, he felt somehow guilty
for the pleasures, the dark secrets.
He noticed the leaves, and took heart.
They, too, had had a wild night.
They were yellow and shriveled, barely
hanging on. As if they also had loved furiously,
secretly, and now were in a state
of shock. It was a new day, and all
over his country men and women were making coffee,
putting on the shirts and pants behind which our bodies
lie still all day, sleeping like owls, worn out
from the night's long chase, its bloody victories
and secret, unremarked defeats.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Underground by Jim Moore. Copyright © 2014 Jim Moore. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
from The New Body (1975),Two Flute Songs,
Wolf,
At the Laundromat,
The History of Roses,
Resolutions,
Coming Back for Help,
Music,
At 7 A.M., Watching the Cars on the Bridge,
How to Close the Great Distance between People,
Sunset,
Trapped,
Secrets,
For a Moment,
In the New World,
from The Freedom of History (1988),
Today's Meditation (It's Not Supposed to Last Forever),
Today's Meditation (Happiness),
Today's Meditation,
Today's Meditation (Travel: Ravenna),
A Summer Afternoon, Venice,
Today's Meditation (The Crucifixion),
The Freedom of History,
Winter Smoke,
Snow,
Details from the August Heat: Your Rape One Year Later,
Here, Too, There Is a Paradise,
Rothko,
Matisse's Dance,
Terror's Only Epitaph,
In Rain,
What the Bird Sees,
Giving Away Love,
London: 33, the Last Movement, the Longest Day,
All the Raised Arms,
The Poet of Minsk,
For You,
from The Long Experience of Love (1995),
The Long Experience of Love,
Queen Elizabeth on TV,
To Wish It Goodnight,
After My Father's Death,
The Young Men,
The Portrait,
Hold Up Winter,
Try Thinking of Death This Way,,
Boy,
Think of the World as a Week Alone,
With Timmy, In and Out of Prison,
6:30 A.M., the Sounds of Traffic,
January 1, the Beach,
Preparing for Fifty,
The Task at Hand,
In the Café: the Grown Daughter,
Freshman Papers,
Near Herons,
In Rome, I Ran the Tiber,
Six Days with Fra Filippo Lippi's Frescoes in the Duomo at Spoleto,
At Fifty,
from Writing with Tagore: Homages and Variations (2003),
Writing with Tagore (1, 2, 3),
from Lightning at Dinner (2005),
You Are Human,
Brief Lives,
Given Your Species,
Brief Lives: Warning,
When I Was a Boy I Was,
Pompeii,
Brief Lives: Vacation,
Lighter Now,
I Don't Think We Need to Know,
Brief Lives: Forgive Him,
It Is Not the Fact That I Will Die That I Mind,,
Lightning at Dinner,
Blood Harmony,
Learning a New Language,
8:03 P.M.,
It Is the Hour,
Red Poppy, Almost Dark under an Olive Tree,
Pointless,
Teaching the Dog Not to Nip,
What to Write When a Landscape Is Too Beautiful,
At Night We Read Aloud The Aeneid,
On the Train to Venice,
Against Empire,
Soon,
What It's Like Here,
Christ Resurrected,
Self-Portrait Doing T'ai Chi in Chinatown, 7 A.M.,
It,
Last Night at Dinner,
When the Dog Is Sick,
Get Used to It, Being,
It Is Hard Not to Love the World,,
Happiness,
Crickets Well Begun,
Late/Later/Latest,
Strange World,
At Least,
On That Day,
What Do I Look Like?,
from Invisible Strings (2011),
Love in the Ruins,
Epitaph,
Almost Sixty,
On This Cloudy May Day,
Those Others,
Five Charms in Praise of Bewilderment,
How We Got Used,
The Tempest: Act 2 (Scene 2 Ends),
Birthday,
First the Good News:,
All That Talk of the Moon,
In the Long Afterward,
Waiting to Take Off,
After Dinner,
Midnight and the Low Sound of Water,
Three Days in Spoleto,
Blood in Our Headlights, Car Wrecked, the Boar Dead,
Sleeping with Mona Lisa,
Triumphs,
Trying to Leave Saint Paul,
The Four Stages of Love,
Above All, Don't Forget,
Instead of Calm,
Of All Places,
Poem without an Ending,
Moonlight Shining Barely,
Her Joy,
Homefront,
In the Shadow of the Rod and Reel Club,
Thanksgiving,
If I Could Have Been a Buddhist,,
Nebraska Fragments,
Disappearing in America,
Last Night I Dreamed That Man, the One,
When All Else Fails,
There Goes That Little Mutt from Down the Street,
Anniversary,
Examples,
Not Taking It Personally,
My Fame,
Blizzard,
Her Bitterness Makes Sense—,
True Enough,,
Pigeons in a Black Sky,,
On the Day After,
Gradually, That Half-Smile,
After Life,
My Swallows Again,
Twenty Questions: New Poems (2014),
Twenty Questions,
In My Dream,
Last Sunday Afternoon,
Be Careful,,
Keep It,
Ars Poetica,
At the Met,
Insomnia,
I Kept Hoping There Might Be an Easier Way,,
My Sentence: Today I Do Know It,
29 Stillnesses,
Dark Eye,
I Drank Three Glasses of Montefalco Red,,
Variations on a Poem by Du Fu,
Yesterday,
Late Summer Slowly Insisting,
Underground,
Meanwhile,,
Life: A Disappearance,