It's About Time

Stanley Moss

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784102401
• eBook ISBN: 9781784102418
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Stanley Moss dedicates these poems 'to departed friends: human, canine, arboreal, avian', setting the tone for a collection that is celebratory, occasional, salutatory. Striking out at 'Sunrise', the poems move through sections for 'Noon', 'Sunset', and 'Eclipse'. As light turns to shade, and shade to darkness, the viewpoint matures, grows deliberative, more aware of a pressing mortality. History, religion and cosmology proffer their solaces; death and grief are redeemed as tradition or rite, acts of god or fate. Ultimately it is the will to think, to remember, and to memorialise that offer solid foundations: 'It took time before I took my time', writes the poet. Moss creates a wonderfully peopled and cultivated world - one that is wild, giving, ephemeral. // 'Unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.' - John Ashbery // 'I've loved Stanley's poems since I first encountered a poem of his in Poetry magazine in John Berryman's office when I was nineteen.' - W.S. Merwin // 'God may or may not be his co-pilot, but Moss has a knack for lifting my spirits into 'the sweaty / life-loving, Book-loving air of happiness'.' - Parnassus // 'This is a book made of experience and high intellect.... these poems curse and sing about the blessings and tragedies of personal life... an important, gutsy collection.'- Yusef Komunyakaa

A Rose

How can you run about

two minutes after you are born?

Be a horse, then you can discover

a valley, the taste of a mare’s nipple,

your coat moist with her 3-year-old blood.

In a dream set partly in a horse barn,

greenhouse, outdoors classroom, I thought

universe after universe is not here,

is out there, out there, there, there,

there, still going . . .

Here and a rose are within my reach,

visible without wise instruments.

Our earth and sun don’t matter an onion

to dark matter, places without address.

Justice is not done in the universe,

where the only evidence admissible is invisible

or with sweet deceiving countenance.

If all the world’s a stage, the players have stage fright.

Ding dong, the final doorbell is ringing.

(In Middle Scottish ‘ding’ means worthy.)

Mr Trouble won’t take his finger off

the button. I’m here, unmetaphorical.

No friend or Eurydice is like any other,

lost friends sometimes come as visitations.

Still I take up with string theory

or the rose-by-any-other-rose theory

that holds water.

A bee flew into a rose,

found darkness and silence there,

flew into another rose and another,

then bang, fires, everything.

Gravity and darkness are not dreary.

Mathematicians are heroes

who give meaning to numbers,

a wilderness of zeroes.

The thing about the cosmos

is what we cannot see is beautiful.

Not I, you and me is what I want to say.

My calling card is the periodic table.

I am thorium, the 90th element,

silvery and black.

Protons, the cosmos, black holes,

white dwarfs are never gross.

Soon after the invention of the present tense

there was comparative and superlative,

so off we went to war. We breathe in and out:

the simple past came just like that.

We believed, needed to pray, invented talk,

writing to keep accounts,

although greeting by smelling, whining,

crying, howling, served us well.

We could say please, thank you, good morning

and good night, I love you, without a word.

A child asked me a question: ‘Back at the start,

bang!, cruel, kind, or no heart?’

Album

Among family photos,

a school of smiling rainbow trout.

A magician uncle explained:

they swam across the ocean

although they were freshwater fish,

not saltwater fish. Our good fish family

studied hard underwater and learned

the scrolls, the shelves, the sudden drops.

They were taught to watch out

for sturgeon, salmon, striped bass

coming up river, some to die,

others laid eggs, then returned to the ocean.

My cousin looked for an underwater Bible

in the lily pads but never found it,

saw turtles as big as automobile tires,

but he kept looking, breaking water for heaven’s sake.

Lucky he had eyes that saw in a full circle

not just straight ahead, so he did better.

They had a Watchman fish, an old fish,

too old to fertilise eggs,

every scale thick as a windscreen,

he watched for lone fish returning from war.

Somehow they became human.

They would rather be buried

than thrown overboard into any puddle.

Mr Trouble

Whatever the season

I add and subtract days and weeks.

I was with my dogs in the park,

I met Monsieur Troublé,

‘Mr Trouble’, laughing.

‘What are you laughing at?’ I asked.

He spake thus: ‘I’ve read you.

I grant every birth is a nativity, holy.

Love, perhaps simply befriending,

is the answer in a world

where looking at something changes it.

Yes, eyes change the world.’

‘No, no’, a passing angel said, ‘Ave Maria

gratia plena, Dominus tecum—

words in the Virgin’s ear gave her a Son.’

I said, ‘Then the nose, smelling changes the world.

Tasting, barely touching or lovemaking changes the world.’

‘Nobody is speaking for the ocean’, Mr Trouble said.

I offered: Moonlight is the traveller

and there was a full moon—

moon, mothered by winter, mothered by spring.

Day goes where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Sunrise—Morning
• 12 Noon
• Sunset—Night
• Eclipse
• Merry-Go-Round: Early Poems
• Index of Titles
• Copyright