Mary B. Moore
At the American Café, Fall 2016
I idolize our waitress
who witnesses it all
but asks anyway for orders
under the clouds redolent
with the unwept I meant
to speak but can’t.
The downtown bus
sighs open as she turns away,
and bearded man steps down.
Fatigued, bereted, he’s
stink and roll-eye,
and speaks in tongues,
and arms up, handles
the snakes of air.
Cameras like cyclopses
eye him, perched
on light poles.
They phone us in on film.
But she whose fan I am––
Demeter Hera Diane––
brings me wine, pink
like optimism’s lens.
Eye of the Swan,
it’s called, a poeticism
no doubt. I’d be kind
as Diane to canny man
if only stink were not his aura.
I raise my glass to him
and blink. The camera doesn’t.
Mary B. Moore is the author of Flicker (Broadkill River Press, 2016), winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Award; the chapbook Eating the Light (Sable Books, 2016 ); and the poetry collection The Book of Snow (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1998). New poems are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Poem/Memoir/Story, Unsplendid, Still the Journal, and the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia (Vandalia Press, 2017). She is professor emerita of poetry and Renaissance literature at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.
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