Jim Moore

     Shouldn't you begin with the saw
taking down the cypress? With the boy waiting for the two horses

     to come? Begin with how you spent years
lying on a bed in a darkened room? You were a town

     deserted by everyone who had once lived there.
In the end it's the three quarter moon—each night smaller—

    setting behind the hill, that you return to.
True, you fake wisdom, but the sadness and the joy are for real.

    As is the death growing inside us all.
And, too, that old woman counting her figs one by one under a streetlight.