George B. Moore

This is perhaps the finest poem that will appear in the Cold Eye anthology now under construction here in the teeming offices of Round Bend Press.

It is from George B. Moore. At the time of this submission, in 1978, Moore waited tables at Jake's Famous Crawfish Restaurant in Portland. He was a classy, mustachioed expert who carried himself with the grace only the best waiters can exhibit in the hectic atmosphere of a crowded restaurant.

George likely did very, very well for himself as a waiter. But he had greater ambition. The last I heard, Mr. Moore was working at Colorado State, in the English Department, dispensing his wise thoughts on poetics.

You'll understand how that came to be after reading this:


Poem from a Map, National Geographic Society 1962

Brazil stands dark
in the lettering of the Midwest,
as if somewhere out beyond the Amazon
there is corn
and fields of freshly cultivated earth
muddied rich with the tropic rains
and now anxious to produce.
The high plateau of the Mato Grosso
does not appear as vast and
unpopulated here,
it simply rises up out of the paper
already yellowed and antiquated
as each thin blue line.
The once true tributaries are now lies
not fabrications but good histories
that have changed.
Argentina is blue
and though the printer may never
have felt it, feels cold
and as easily European as assassination.
Now as then, her lines are not lies
but difficult rumors and reflections
of the truth.
We are going down to Rio
from the banana farms of Suriname,
by boat as far as Belem
and then by small plane, flying low
like scavengers over
the open arteries of the jungle.
The waterways are scars
we follow to the blade
and the source of steel
even when old and often vanished.
To sense the full flatness of our map
we plot with blind fingers
and run the risk of madness at the thought
of being lost, or those of strangulation
in these breathing interwoven spaces.
Soon, however, our skins begin to crawl
with the crowded populations
of the eastern coast.
We circumscribe the bad of Guanabara
and land. In long days
of transport our eyes have grown
to near the size of this huge
red Brazilian sun,
great orbs glazed in savage witness
and burned by the irons of memory:
The green, like a sea
the land hissing there is no softness here
only growth.

George B. Moore

TS