All Poems

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He Made This Screen

© Marianne Clarke Moore

not of silver nor of coral,
but of weatherbeaten laurel. Here, he introduced a sea
uniform like tapestry; here, a fig-tree; there, a face;
there, a dragon circling space -- designating here, a bower;

Spenser's Ireland

© Marianne Clarke Moore

has not altered;--
a place as kind as it is green,
the greenest place I've never seen.
Every name is a tune.

The Paper Nautilus

© Marianne Clarke Moore

For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by

Rosemary

© Marianne Clarke Moore

Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary -
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly -
born of the sea supposedly,
at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary -

No Swan So Fine

© Marianne Clarke Moore

"No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine

To a Steam Roller

© Marianne Clarke Moore

The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

The Past is the Present

© Marianne Clarke Moore

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class

Nevertheless

© Marianne Clarke Moore

you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,

Baseball and Writing

© Marianne Clarke Moore

Fanaticism?No.Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go

Peter

© Marianne Clarke Moore

Strong and slippery,
built for the midnight grass-party
confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away--
the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding

Marriage

© Marianne Clarke Moore

This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one's mind

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

The Pangolin

© Marianne Clarke Moore

Another armored animal--scale
lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they
form the uninterrupted central
tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped

Silence

© Marianne Clarke Moore

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.

A Grave

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as
you have to it yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in

The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

To a Canadian Aviator Who Died for his Country in France

Tossed like a falcon from the hunter's wrist,
A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise,
And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist,
The elastic stairway to the rising sun.