Stanley Moss

The Blanket

The man who never prays
accepts that the wheat field in summer
kneels in prayer when the wind blows across it,
that the wordless rain and snow
protect the world from blasphemy.
His wife covers him with a blanket
on a cold night--it is, perhaps, a prayer?
The man who never prays says kindness and prayer
are close, but not as close as sleep and death,
whom the Greeks thought were brothers.
He does not observe the days of awe,
all days are equally holy to him.
In late September, he goes swimming
in the ocean, surrounded by divine intervention.

The Black Maple

After an August Atlantic hurricane,
no curled brine-drenched leaf
was at first to Katherine's eye
a Monarch butterfly,
yet she telephoned the news:
flights of deceived Monarchs
had dropped down on her Black Maple
till she could not tell
leaf from butterfly.
In the morning when I arrived
only the tree of metaphor was there,
the butterflies gone to Mexico,
Katherine and her lover, soon to marry,
returned to Manhattan
to practice medicine and music.
Left behind by so much storm and flutter,
I have almost lost count of the seasons.

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Stanley Moss's most recent book, Asleep in the Garden, New and Selected Poems, was published by the Seven Stories Press. A new book, The Last Judgment, will be published in February 2002. contents | next