Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning

Moore Moran

Acknowledgments

Some of these poems appeared in the following print journals, to whom I make grateful acknowledgement:

“Four” and “The Killing Machine” in The Threepenny Review; “Horseman, 5:14” in The Paris Review; “Sleeping Beauty” and “Somebody’s Mother’s Good Blanket” in Sequoia; “That Breakfast” in The Atlantic Monthly; “Muse” in Edge City Review; “The Mountain Desert” in Roundup; “Late in the Night” in The New Criterion; “Below Dover” in Candelabrum; “The Face” in The Yale Review; and “Ordinary Days” in Drastic Measures.


© 2003 by Moore Moran


Cover art: Ruins in a Moonlit Landscape by Arnold Böcklin


Published by The New Formalist Press


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

Four

I can remember four
all because of two nights.
Mother and Father moved
into a Spanish house
that year. We came loosely
bundled after midnight,
down the alkaline road
south, so long, so fiery.
Big Eva, Dutch nanny,
read icy tales from Grimm
till the indigo sky
went black in the high car
window...motoring dreams.
Two pillow-minded drunks,
my sister and I reeled
through echoing cool rooms
to fall in shadowy beds.

It was a run-hide house
with a pomegranate tree
in the old court below
where the wind never came.
Within a week, the red
below my room (that no-
red-like-it red) took me,

with its tart seeds, fast friends
so that afterward when
the circus stopped outside
and I could not come down,
having been bad that day,
but high over the court
watched them in their costumes,
after supper singing
out through the tall rose gate,
up the around-town hill,
the pomegranate tree was
bleeding in the dusk,
redder than the clown’s mouth
and redder than Rose Red.

Horseman, 5:14

I am exhumed on the express,
Out of the aftermath of five,
And though I starve on consciousness,
Dead reckoning keeps me alive.

Transient, I ride like sun on chrome.
Velocity, my brightest skill,
Sustains me like an ordered home;
Meaning is individual.

As the enigma deepens, I,
Who hunt on plains of sensory error,
Mete out the judgment of my eye
And multiply in finite terror.

My love is waiting near her bed,
Great shadows fall upon the West;
Train, freighted with tomorrow's dead,
Take me to fury, not to rest.

Nightpiece

Welcome, Michael—our home.
Wonder, delight, render us numb!
Above the park, this is your room
Where love at last has come.

Your tiny fingers fend off sounds
Womb’s dark would not admit--
First rites of self, genetic poise
Securing what the darkness knit.

Pines hush and brighten at the moon,
Fat stars high-step across the night;
To you, as now, be ever drawn
The promises of light.

Tonight will come no harm
Save this: that I must dare to hold
Awareness, watchful, weightless, warm,
The tyranny of three days old.

My Poem in the Lobby at Hewlett Packard

A Steuben ashtray blinked disdainfully,
Daring my Kool to near; my lyric hope
Lay buried there on coffee table oak.
I knew the Atlantic by an exposed corner
Of famed masthead composed beneath the shout
Of well-thumbed Newsweek, much-consulted Forbes.
No need of exhumations, I had seen
The comers’ page where Plath’s poem paired with mine:
Heraldings of exiles yet to come.

Truth was our hope of haven then, not death
Nor the false calm of corporate mooring posts,
Yet there I stood on a sea of Tyrian shag,
My interview splashing out to anchor me.
In recommended pitch I bobbed and belled:
Impassive, fraudulent energy for hire.

Sleeping Beauty

She sleeps in a palace of rose innocence
Under day’s murmurs in the slow vine’s hold;
From coral walls is culled an utterance
When stray birds come and pick at her rings of gold.
She does not see the silver rains that fall
Through palace silences, nor does she heed
In the east wood the flute’s insistent call
Rife with sweet rumors of awakening need.
Prodigal sunsets dote upon her, till,
Racing to reassert its old hauteur,
A late persimmon moon scatters its chill.
No, nothing here is known—nothing to learn,
Only time's fingerings which will never stir
In her French arms the tendons of concern.

Just Joking

This morning I am fifty one
(Maybe a third of a tank left)
And all the read and spoken words of thirty years
Spill like the urgently indifferent tides at Rio del Mar.
Only the gags seem somehow to hang on.

Talking Kant with Thalberg was a rich mix,
Fueling a friendship with heady afternoons,
But always it was best when we strayed
Into the preposterous, sometimes
Laughing until the dogs down in the garden digging,
Looked quizzically back at us with adobe-caked noses.

At Father Dunne’s the argument was Grace,
Which took us late into the merlot hours.
I could not buy his gentle certainties,
But ending those nights swapping limericks
Among the jittering sycamores
Sealed us friends to the grave.

I think what it comes to is
the bewildered heart in us,
Which year by year measuring our slim attainments
With mounting despair, still feeds
In its recesses some faint hope, despite
The certain knowledge that what it hopes for
Cannot change the tide,

And in these moments, a joke,
Shaggy, cosmic, learned or foul,
Needs no defense.

On Wyeth’s Below Dover

A nameless sloop in sedge grass points
Off toward a sea the sand dune hides,
The blue leached from her hull and joints,
Her cabin echoing old tides

That curled her here to tamer winds.
Her boom protests but little: short
Jibes shudder to corrosive ends.
Forgotten in the local port,

She leans like deafness to the cry
Of summering children come to race
Her decks with games of ‘Capt’n Bligh,’
Till dusk-borne dinner bells sound truce.

The silence holds. A humid moon
Visits her hull then climbs away
To light, atop a nearby dune,
Her sightless march into decay.

Late in the Night

Late in the night I dreamed I was to die,
To see through change to the unchanging season
Where love is said to live and reign (blue sky
Is for the called no less than for the chosen).
My love lay with me softly, murmuring
In sleep of cherished seasons come and gone,
Sweet passings which in time soured, corrupting
Our hands and lips and eyes. Who to atone?
Between two worlds I hovered, tried to hedge,
But no scheme came, only the terror in
Surrendering what I am, heartbreak serrating
Awareness to a raw and mortal edge,
And I, dense tangle of transgressions, waiting
For the dark, the accusation or the grin.

Muse

Cherry-hard young I was
When first you bedded me
And did the things lust does.
Though you lived fast and free

I was not one who sought
New faces or new ends,
Hungry for what you taught:
The tyranny, the amends.

Of late, you’re back again
(No new lads to uncover?)
Demanding I maintain
Some semblance of the lover;

Listen, I held your heat
Risking all to defend it!
Old now, I cannot cheat
The silence that must end it.

So let it end in sleep,
The spectral with the human;
What goddess cares to keep
At love’s expense love’s union?

You’d think I might have learned,
Having done Hell and burned.

Not Regardless of My Love

Not regardless of my love,
Or the spirit in the dove
Who, for Saint John by the sea,
Simplified eternity,
I have listened as your claims,
First forsworn by Roman names,
Skirted now by dull respect
Wait in silence and neglect.
God forgive my intellect.

That Breakfast

His pigeons have reached darkness
By now, and absolute shade,
The one fast color, hardened
The rich change of his blue gaze.

Indelible leaves falling
Across the Sundays, firing
An ice-rimmed sky or blazing
In his page, will hold his sound.

Earth only will find him cold.

How fair must have been that late
And inexorable stand
When, closely groomed, breakfasting
Expensively on warm wine,
Eggs Benedict, he reworked
Some dark juxtaposition,

His gaze led by innocence,
His hands in the moment, all
Malice suspended softly,
And heard in the seventh hour,
Dilating like the sea’s prose,
That long formality: peace.

The Face

As long ago as Atlantis
We remember your face,
At the south window
Of the palace, sending
Banner-spanned
Festival streets below
Into fresh hysteria.

And later in Prague
How you swam for
The communists, toppling
Record after world record,
Then standing for the press,
A dripping goddess.

We have seen you
In the plum-dark desert
Just before dawn, walking
With a gas can, your hair-
Lights mirroring the new sky
Like eyes of immigrants.

Always these moments escaped
Into dim frescos, or
Grainy photographs
Or easy sentimental poems,

Leaving us to imagine
How the Hunter must have felt
Losing you that day
In the Greek forest,
His astonished fingers
Shrinking from your laurel neck.

The Killing Machine

In boot camp at Ord everybody was dead serious
About the training
As the war ground down to a
terminal idle that still chewed up kids.
There were a thousand tricks to learn in those
Sixteen weeks, packed tighter than a Pound canto.

Gradually I saw that just two skills
Relative to the rank of private
Were going to get me through the moment
And whatever might come after:
Shooting straight and staying anonymous.

So I perfected myself in the care and firing
Of that edgy equalizer, the M1 rifle,
And slept whenever I could through the rest of it.

And it turned out in the platoon I had a clone
—Same height, weight, eye color and so forth—
Named Morgan. Put fatigues on us
And our mothers couldn't tell us apart,
So naturally the cadre
Was constantly mistaking us too.

I’d stay out of sight and he’d yell, “Morgan,
Clean the shit cans!” or “Morgan, police

The wrappers—let’s see some ass and elbows!”
And Morgan, the poor bastard, plodded
Week after week through this plain
Case of mistaken identity and never did catch on.

The last day, when we were fully trained and terrified
The cadre said, “Well, Morgan, how does it feel
To be a killing machine?”
I told him the name was Moran
And that it felt piss-poor. He stared at me like
He’d never seen me before, which of course he hadn’t.

Ordinary Days

So now, Ordinary days.
Advent, Pentecost are past;
Who now will accept our sins,
Raise the dust in which we're cast?

Gone the God-flesh from the tree,
Banned the crèche to attic murk,
Feared the silences past breath:
Nothing seems at all to work.

Yet, we try and try again,
Serving you we scarcely know
(Honk if you love Jesus, friend,
Beeping blessings as we go).

Come back, Lord, and claim with sign
Ordinary souls like mine.

The Mountain Desert

You cared about this land when few
Knew where its aberrant canyons led,
Or guessed what hidden springs broke blue
Beneath the elk and deer it fed.

Here you were exiled finally, snared
By the very summits of your skill;
No one before or since has dared
Your output, and your books come still!

No penance purified your towns.
Counting their blessings, robbed and sold,
Young outlaws grinned at settler sounds;
Unappeased bankers massed their gold.

Between the affluence and the want,
Where thousands came and rebegan,
You struck your claim. Here you would haunt
And celebrate the common man.

You fanned his small insistent fire
With heir, black creek land, toil and fast,
A life propelled by raw desire,
A death he triumphed in at last.

Sun smolders in the upper peaks,
Leaking its glory from the spill;
Once more your simple ethic speaks
Across these mesas, dry and still.

Today in Time

Today I turned in time, the door
Closed on my good friend sixty-four;
He will not call again before
I lock up and receive no more.
Can someone say what friends are for?

Somebody’s Mother’s Good Blanket

They park their fuchsia Bug  next to
my heap, making us
the only two cars in the lot,

and head out toward the surf
where I lie reading. They flap down somebody's
mother's good blanket and that makes
us the only two parties on a gray beach.

Casually these high school couples
look through me--a drift log chosen
to anchor them in the wind.

First things first. They crank up
the ghettoblaster, open four beers and, gushing
of The Stones and The Dead,
peel to the buff.

The blond has boobs like cucumbers,
ass flat as Sudan; the redhead,
all hips and stomach, resembles
a Bosc pear; standard bean pole
the boys, knees, hair and teeth mostly.

The four perch, all talking at once,
looking every place but at me and each
other, their voices steadily rising like
a robe of sound to cover them in
their push toward identity.

They don’t touch each other, and their beers
stand full and forgotten.

The laughing’s a hair too loud,
and though I'm rooting for them,
goose bumps are sprouting everywhere.
They’re not pulling it off at all.

Plath

Bright blitz of line zapped each offending phantom:
Imagination in an endless tantrum.

About the Author

Moore Moran lives in Santa Rosa, CA with his wife and 10-year-old Cockapoo, “Honey.” A retired advertising creative director and copywriter, his poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. Presently he is working on his second full-length book of poems, An Awful Leisure.