Monday, July 2, 2012

Monday Poems: "By the Lake" -- Richard O. Moore

Past year are figures in old glass
wobbly in a lake
wrinkled by a stone.

The lake will settle down
a face will reappear
in a scent of evergrenn.

Years are present as noon as now
or in a rippled moonglade night;
they summon shadow as in fragile memory
easy as stepping into a lake
breaking the present mirror.

It is the way events are stored.
they come back twisted in wrinkles of water

blurred inscapes into today.

*     *     *     *     *

Richard O. Moore, now 92, is a poet, filmmaker, and seminal figure in public radio and television. Moore belonged to the San Francisco Renaissance literary circle of Kenneth Rexroth in the 1940s and 1950s, a precursor of the Beat poetry movement. "By the Lake" was published in his collection, Writing the Silences, his second book.

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