Mary B. Moore

NOT UNDERSTANDING BUT BEARING

One approach is to practice becoming the thing 
you aren’t, that graveyard column

that looks like marble but isn’t, which bears only air, 
a singular ruin and a rule

of one without minders. Or take the weightless
lei or wreath of Tibetan prayer flags 

my window holds, paper miniatures, 
red, green, blue, gold, square wings strung together,

each bearing illegible words, petitions.
They shush and whisper when I pass,

the language of quiescence, a diaspora’s
small vespers, and they wait, like a watcher’s

breathing silence listens to. Sometimes the temporal
bulges, an immanence and a pressing forward

around a ruin’s column, among flags that tremble
and pray. And there’s breakage: the bare tree limbs

on the ridge have fractured sunset: burning 
wedges, wing shapes, shards. Even breathing 

breaks the sky.  My friend whose dying 
still breathes is stirring 

the prayer flags: the paper lisps, 
a slight sibilance, breath and no breath, breath and no

breath. If what makes her her survives,
it is not the I, thick, fluted with rain, sun,

and the traffic of eyes:
it’s weightless and can ride the air,

able to bear and break 
without breaking, burn without burning,

even in this room where I hold vigil,
among flags whose country is air—

the flags of our country, which is air.
And what is the I after all: 

air, a vowel I pronounce
aieee, aieee, almost a keening––

Mary B. Moore's new full length poetry collection, Dear If, is due out from Orison Books in late 2021. Her books and chapbooks include Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys Chapbook Prize, 2017); Flicker (Dogfish Head Poetry Book Prize, 2016); Eating the Light (Sable Books Chapbook Contest, 2016); and The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State University Press, 1997). She has also received awards for poems in Terrain, Nelle, Nimrod, and Asheville Poetry Review. Recent work appears in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Catamaran, the Nasty Women Poets Anthology, Fire and Rain-Ecopoetry of California, and others. As professor at Marshall University, she taught Renaissance literature, poetry and Shakespeare and has published critical articles on women poets, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and a scholarly book, Desiring Voices, Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism. Her website is marybmoorepoetry.com.