Daniel Edward Moore

Restoration Cost

Long after ordinary dragged mud through the house
and let the dog lick sweat off his beard as he popped
a can of Old Milwaukee and started watching Bonanza,

there were extraordinary sights and sounds sculpting the
body’s clay imagination into something hands might hold,
like a shooting star landing in bed, waking to find your lover

changed into ash being sprinkled from grandchildren’s hands
in a garden you both adored. One day the miraculous will not
sound like a babbling brook polluted by lips and their cultural spill.

One day the garbage can on the street will not find its way home.
Those are my boots at the door.
The dog in the window is mine.
 

River All His Words

Ohio’s fields raised him like corn
sold down on the corner
where barefoot Amish children
worship dirt with wonder.

At 91, his breath is beatific and
silent as a saint. Grief
in its grandest form
has not summoned my tears.

I know there are memories
the throat would rather swallow,
which is why my tongue will
river all his words.

If Autumn is when graves
ask trees to do their make-up
he’ll make me his longest summer.
I will run the lights.
 

Daniel Edward Moore has poems forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, The Bitter Oleander, The Chiron Review, and elsewhere. He is also the author of Boys and Waxing the Dents.