poems by

Ruth Moose

Pure Heart Press

Poetry book, 86 pages, $10 cover price

ISBN: 978-1-93090-743-0

Released: 2004

 OUT OF STOCK

Leave it to Ruth Moose, one of the best storytellers around, to use the bed as plot. She takes ‘the four-cornered world and sets it straight’ with humor, compassion and intelligence. This book is a pleasure to read.

Judy Goldman

Ruth Moose is first and always a storyteller, and in Making the Bed she tells us the stories of a life in terms of fairy tales, memories, and different beds: marriage beds, birth beds, Penelope’s bed, single beds, death beds. Her spare lyrical language dramatizes the search for significant acts, the spark of connections made.

Robert Morgan

Ruth Moose is a rare, fine talent. Her work dazzles and sings, bringing challenge and joy to the reader. I highly recommend!

Bennie Lee Sinclair

Few writers can handle both prose and poetry, but Ruth Moose does them equally well, and with this double grasp has become one of North Carolina’s best writers. She displays a poetic mind of the largest and most generous sympathies. What joy to encounter a mind so imbued and so rich with cultural references, a rare thing these days. It is a mind, too, of great spiritual intensity. Who else but Ruth Moose could make the statement: “God is a marigold,” and make you believe it?

Charles Edward Eaton

EVE LOOKS BACK

The God who married
Adam and Eve wasn’t
her father though she’d been
warned by the worm
things would change.
She thought better,
never worse. Optimist
she’d always been,
gave it a try; a spin
of a year and by then
there was too much to move,
nowhere to go. Home to Mom?
A laugh. Besides it rained
daily in that thick garden.
Here at least she had a roof.
Thatched by light, it kept
wind out, though shadowed
by anything that climbed and
that was a lot; animals with tails,
those not, like the worm,
lavender in his leaving.

No bureau to undo what she’d done,
no judge to say what went
to whom. He could have the children,
both boys, bronze and smart
mouthed. She knew their kind.

She wanted what
she’d never had.
God knows the place,
the price.

TIN YEARS

It wasn’t her fault, he came home
from the office at 10 AM,
stayed twelve years?
The house where Washington
Road met Cornwallis Lane was cut
in half by pride. Ashes
on that fixed mortgage hearth
collected like cinders and the brass
knocker on the colonial blue door
tarnished green. Ivy
couldn’t hide
the fact he quit, ran to sit
in the corner like Cinderella
waited for work to find him.
Lord, it was hard
keeping the kids in shoes,
herself in skirts going store
to store, trying to sell herself
in never the package she meant to present.
Tough juggler of magic,
she tugged silver from her sleeves,
behind her head, out her ear.
He never noticed.
She can tell you
about the second ten years;
after the bliss.
You learn to forgive.
Yourself first. After the gown
of guilt gets haircloth coarse.
Those years
of no money, no plans
where time wore everything
they owned.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GOD AND SPARROWS

A sparrow drinks
from the dripping faucet
in the marigolds garden;
their ginger scent sharp
as the hawk hovering
on the live oak limb
From the Episcopal Church
muted songs, careful prayers
even sparrows pray. You deny.
“Nietzsche was right,” you say,
“Three hundred in a church,
three hundred gods.”

I think of the story you tell
of your baptismal day.
How you hid under stairs.
Then it thundered, lightened
and finally they found you
crouched as pigeons crouch
below the hawk. I am like
the sparrows shrieking,
“Thereheis, thereheis.”

You denied, became instead
king for an hour
as many hours as you own.
God isn’t the hawk,
nor sparrow, nor Nietzsche
in church. Believe me.
God is a marigold.