February 2022
Bio Note: I'm an emigrant from California to West Virginia, a move I made for a tenure-track teaching job, and the payback was getting to teach poetry and Shakespeare, two of my loves, for almost 20 years. I've come to love Appalachia. My conversion experience was white-water rafting the New River, which is the oldest river in North America, in 1996 with strangers and laughing through the rapids the whole way. Retired now, I can focus on my poetry, and have three books: , (forthcoming, Orison Books, April 2022); Flicker, winner of the Dogfish Head Prize 2016); and The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State UP, 1997).
Dear Pilot
for Marie Manilla
Those ephemeral Xs, the crossbones
where two contrails meet? Marie’s father
signing the sky, her mom said. She imagined
a literal heaven where everything means,
a world of Medieval letters illuminated,
capitals bearing birds, animals, vines—
as if words gave birth to world.
No wonder her daughter writes.
Imagine the monks at work, heads bent in rows,
the pink Os their tonsures frame,
the vowel of pleasure, pain and wonder,
like fontanelles open again to whatever’s
above. Today’s sign mimics the neighbor’s
chain-link fence—rows of Xs—
all girls, their chromosomes akin.
Or they’re rows of Anonymous, women
poets, painters, playwrights history erased.
Poor X, you un-name even as you mark
the spot we who are named can sign.
Maybe your sign, pilot, is the skewed cross
I once worshipped the burden of. Dear flyer,
long gone, do you sign yourself, or signal
absence? Whose, we’ll never know.
©2022 Mary B. Moore
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