Online Poems By Thylias Moss Essay, Research Paper
ONE FOR ALL NEWBORNS
By Thylias Moss
They kick and flail like crabs on their backs.
Parents outside the nursery window do not believe
they might raise assassins or thieves, at the very worst.
a poet or obscure jazz Musician whose politics
spill loudly from his horn.
Everything about it was wonderful, the method
of conception, the gestation, the womb opening
in perfect analogy to the mind’s expansion.
Then the dark succession of constricting years,
mother competing with daughter for beauty and losing,
varicose veins and hot-water bottles, joy boiled away,
the arrival of knowledge that eyes are birds with clipped wings,
the sun at a 30? angle and unable to go higher, parents
who cannot push anymore, who stay by the window
looking for signs of spring
and the less familiar gait of grown progeny.
I am now at the age where I must begin to pay
for the way I treated my mother. My daughter is just like me.
The long trip home is further delayed, my presence
keeps the plane on the ground. If I get off, it will fly.
The propeller is a cross spinning like a buzz saw
about to cut through me. I am haunted and my mother is not dead.
The miracle was not birth but that I lived despite my crimes.
I treated God badly also; he is another parent
watching his kids through a window, eager to be proud
of his creation, looking for signs of spring.
From Small Congregations, Ecco Press, Hopewell, NJ
Online Source: http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/95/Oct95/mosspoem.html
ALL IS NOT LOST WHEN DREAMS ARE
1.
The dreams float like votive lilies
then melt.
It is the way they sing
going down that I envy and to hear it
I could not rescue them. A dirge
reaches my ears like a corkscrew of smoke
And it sits behind my eyes like a piano roll
Some say this is miracle water
None say dreams made it so
2.
Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for
And flew out of the stream
It was not dreaming
It had no ambition but confusion
In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun
and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl
when it’s broiled
The Titanic is the one that got away.
Online Source: http://tswww.cc.emory.edu/~mkarunu/poetry/moss.html
TORNADOS
Truth is, I envy them
not because they dance; I out jitterbug them
as I’m shuttled through and through legs
strong as looms, weaving time. They
do black more justice than I, frenzy
of conductor of philharmonic and electricity, hair
on end, result of the charge when horns and strings release
the pent up Beethoven and Mozart. Ions played
instead of notes. The movement
is not wrath, not hormone swarm because
I saw my first forming above the church a surrogate
steeple. The morning of my first baptism and
salvation already tangible, funnel for the spirit
coming into me without losing a drop, my black
guardian angel come to rescue me before all the words
get out, I looked over Jordan and what did I see coming for
to carry me home. Regardez, it all comes back, even the first
grade French, when the tornado stirs up the past, bewitched spoon
lost in its own spin, like a roulette wheel that won’t
be steered like the world. They drove me underground,
tornado watches and warnings, atomic bomb drills. Adult
storms so I had to leave the room. Truth is
the tornado is a perfect nappy curl, tightly wound,
spinning wildly when I try to tamper with its nature, shunning
the hot comb and pressing oil even though if absolutely straight
I’d have the longest hair in the world. Bouffant tornadic
crown taking the royal path on a trip to town, stroll down
Tornado Alley where it intersects Memory Lane. Smoky spirit-
clouds, shadows searching for what cast them.
Online Source: http://tswww.cc.emory.edu/~mkarunu/poetry/moss.html
THE RAPTURE OF DRY ICE BURNING OFF SKIN AS THE MOMENT OF THE SOUL’S APOTHEOSIS
Ho
if we won’t hold onto it?
Not even extinction stops me; when
I’ve sufficient craving, I follow the buffalo,
their hair hanging below their stomachs like
fringes on Tiffany lampshades; they can be turned on
so can I by a stampede, footsteps whose sound
is my heart souped up, doctored, ninety pounds
running off a semi’s invincible engine. Buffalo
heaven is Niagara Falls. There their spirit
gushes. There they still stampede and power
the generators that operate the Tiffany lamps
that let us see in some of the dark. Snow
inundates the city bearing their name; buffalo
spirit chips later melt to feed the underground,
the politically dredlocked tendrils of roots. And this
has no place in reality, is trivial juxtaposed with
the faces of addicts, their eyes practically as sunken
as extinction, gray ripples like hurdlers’ track lanes
under them, pupils like just more needle sites.
And their arms: flesh trying for a moon apprenticeship,
a celestial antibody. Every time I use it
the umbrella is turned inside out,
metal veins, totally hardened arteries and survival
without anything flowing within, nothing saying
life came from the sea, from anywhere but coincidence
or God’s ulcer, revealed. Yet also, inside out
the umbrella tries to be a bouquet, or at least
the rugged wrapping for one that must endure much,
without dispensing coherent parcels of scent,
before the refuge of vase in a room already accustomed
to withering mind and retreating skin. But the smell
of the flowers lifts the corners of the mouth as if
the man at the center of this remorse has lifted her
in a waltz. This is as true as sickness. The Jehovah’s
Witness will come to my door any minute with tracts, an
inflexible agenda and I won’t let him in because
I’m painting a rosy picture with only blue and
yellow (sadness and cowardice).
I’m something of an alchemist. Extinct.
He would tell me time is running out.
I would correct him: time ran out; that’s why
history repeats itself, why we can’t advance.
What joy will come has to be here right now: Cheer
to wash the dirt away, Twenty Mule Team Borax and
Arm & Hammer to magnify Cheer’s power, lemon-scented
bleach and ammonia to trick the nose, improved–changed–
Tide, almost all-purpose starch that cures any limpness
except impotence. Celebrate that there’s Mastercard
to rule us, bring us to our knees, the protocol we follow
in the presence of the head of our state of ruin, the
official with us all the time, not inaccessible in
palaces or White Houses or Kremlins. Besides every
ritual is stylized, has patterns and repetitions
suitable for adaptation to dance. Here come toe shoes,
brushstrokes, oxymorons. Joy
is at our tongue tips: let the great thirsts and hungers
of the world be the marvelous thirsts, glorious hungers.
Let hearbreak be alternative to coffeebreak, five
midmorning minutes devoted to emotion.
Online Source: http://tswww.cc.emory.edu/~mkarunu/poetry/moss.html
Raising a Humid Flag
Enough women over thirty are at Redbones for
the smell of Dixie Peach to translate the air.
I drink when I’m there because you must have
some transparency in this life and you can’t see
through the glass till it’s empty. Of course I get
next to men with broad feet and bull nostrils to
ward off isolation. You go to Redbones after
you’ve been everywhere else and can see the rainbow
as fraud, a colorful frown.
The best part is after midnight when the crowd
at its thickest raises a humid flag and hotcombed
hair reverts to nappy origins. I go to Redbones to
put an end to denial. Dixie Peach is a heavy pomade
like canned-ham gelatin. As it drips down foreheads
and necks, it’s like tallow dripping down candles
in sacred places.
From AT REDBONES, CSU Poetry Series XXIX.
Copyright ? 1998 Thylias Moss.
Online Source: http://civic.uml.edu/bridge2/andover/moss.html
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