SurVision Magazine
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An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Four
GEORGE MOORE
Under Foreign Skies
Sometimes, at dawn, I imagine
myself imprisoned in a cell
of I don't know who. An Italian Troubadour's mistress, a fallen
Franciscan monk, a Soviet dissident. Often thin clouds of wool
scratch my name in the blue oxidized chalkboard of a foreign sky
as if and as if but never quite as if here. I pick up amber along
the once blockaded coast, the dockyards with their giraffe-like cranes
at midnight loading the black mountains of coal for eternal fires.
I look through the bars of this day into the deep fields beyond
only to muse on plaster cows painted the colors of the national flag
and speculate on the geometry of lives crosshatching a country
and its secret deaths with the countries where death celebrates
its inanity. Those clouds you see over the river Vents are steam
rising from departing trains, or shadows of burning buildings
where the secret police held vigils to the Knights and their sacred texts.
At last, with the sun equalizing earth, I take tea in a small café
in the infamous seaside military enclave of the last oppressive regime
and watch the abandoned buildings crumble in waves of sleep
before writing a line in this innocent notebook, dead in my lap.
James Bond in Pakistan
The streets were slow with Diamonds
are Forever running, untouched
by our slow, sweating minds, and after
miles of bearded men smoking
in the front rows of ancient theaters
and the heavy silver haze
I watched the agent make free
with women in showers and bright
hotel rooms, and dreamed even
of dry martinis (shaken not stirred)
and cars the red of devils with bullet eyes.
And when the first stone hit me
I thought of rain, a brief reprieve
to that summer heat, of how the streets
would be washed clean and fruit
blessed for the bulls in the stalls
who eat to their heart's content
and no one sees them.
Worlding
Silence is the only creature
that knows its own name
but can never speak it
for its name means people
falling out of their skins
people coming out of the air
to fire, people who hide
like mountains in lakes.
The poem is such a landscape
both fields unmowed and
billboards of fields perfectly
painted. Yet a poem
knows nothing of the truth
of its terrain. Each shell
rewrites the fractal geometry
of a coastline. Each hair
of the wolf moving across
the invisible line of a border
curls into the time of other
histories. But then,
history is ours. Watch his eyes
and you will see the erasures
the fields burning, small faces
blackened by ash, the silence
that was yet unknown, born
crying out of this absence.
of I don't know who. An Italian Troubadour's mistress, a fallen
Franciscan monk, a Soviet dissident. Often thin clouds of wool
scratch my name in the blue oxidized chalkboard of a foreign sky
as if and as if but never quite as if here. I pick up amber along
the once blockaded coast, the dockyards with their giraffe-like cranes
at midnight loading the black mountains of coal for eternal fires.
I look through the bars of this day into the deep fields beyond
only to muse on plaster cows painted the colors of the national flag
and speculate on the geometry of lives crosshatching a country
and its secret deaths with the countries where death celebrates
its inanity. Those clouds you see over the river Vents are steam
rising from departing trains, or shadows of burning buildings
where the secret police held vigils to the Knights and their sacred texts.
At last, with the sun equalizing earth, I take tea in a small café
in the infamous seaside military enclave of the last oppressive regime
and watch the abandoned buildings crumble in waves of sleep
before writing a line in this innocent notebook, dead in my lap.
James Bond in Pakistan
The streets were slow with Diamonds
are Forever running, untouched
by our slow, sweating minds, and after
miles of bearded men smoking
in the front rows of ancient theaters
and the heavy silver haze
I watched the agent make free
with women in showers and bright
hotel rooms, and dreamed even
of dry martinis (shaken not stirred)
and cars the red of devils with bullet eyes.
And when the first stone hit me
I thought of rain, a brief reprieve
to that summer heat, of how the streets
would be washed clean and fruit
blessed for the bulls in the stalls
who eat to their heart's content
and no one sees them.
Worlding
Silence is the only creature
that knows its own name
but can never speak it
for its name means people
falling out of their skins
people coming out of the air
to fire, people who hide
like mountains in lakes.
The poem is such a landscape
both fields unmowed and
billboards of fields perfectly
painted. Yet a poem
knows nothing of the truth
of its terrain. Each shell
rewrites the fractal geometry
of a coastline. Each hair
of the wolf moving across
the invisible line of a border
curls into the time of other
histories. But then,
history is ours. Watch his eyes
and you will see the erasures
the fields burning, small faces
blackened by ash, the silence
that was yet unknown, born
crying out of this absence.
George Moore lives in Nova Scotia, Canada. He used to teach at the University of Colorado. His poetry appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Orion, Stand, North American Review, The Colorado Review, Arc, Orbis, and the Dublin Review. His collections include Children's Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry, 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle Press, 2016).
