Carolyn Moore
The Next Time Art Seduces You
For
instance, here—in etching and collagraph—
a
nocturnal scene we crave yet seldom find.
This
tree lacks obvious roots and thus absolves
itself
from all responsibility
for
drawing water from the nearby lake
serene
enough to chart the dithered path
of an
off-stage moon. A stucco house affirms
this
moon, the lakeward wall awash in light
launched from a point of faith beyond the frame.
We
sense the etching’s parenthetical
to our
desire to know the moon exists
beyond
our view—as do all absent fowl—
goatsuckers, frogmouths, oilbirds. For their sake
the
imagination freckles the fancied moon’s
wan
face with pointillist specks to stand for gnats
whose
whine of "take me now!" our birds oblige.
How
quick the mind is to clutter when it needs
to
purge the glut of detail. If this lake
is not
responsible for the thirst of trees,
who
themselves refuse to form a plan for roots,
surely
we’re freed from guilt for appetites
of
birds who wait unbidden in the wings
to
indulge the hankering imagination?
We
yield from hunger to temptations art
allows
us. This is your cautionary tale.
Carolyn Moore
’s poems have
garnered over sixty awards and honors including the Foley Poetry
Award, the New Millennium Writing Award, and the C. Hamilton Bailey
Fellowship for Poetry from Literary Arts, Inc. Her first collection,