by George Moore

Your mother was an antique dealer when she took up after me.
She quickly changed to American Modern (with no thought for her daughter).

I guess we could be happy, the three of us, living separately
in the city, but I am confused about the nails of love.

My job was rebuilding demolished automobiles, piecing together
the parts of foreign cars so that the end result was something like a new vision,

or new enough to sell to one of those older guys who are all looking
for a way out. Love was like driving without a windshield.

Mother still demands the chance to grow flowers in her windowsill box
high above one of the busiest alleyways in the city, where boys are selling drugs

and girls they’ve known in school, living on the edge of their own priceless world.
I want nothing more than to live like Roy says in Blade Runner among the ruins of the stars.

You would not believe what I have seen, out of the corner of my eye, a new galaxy.
Your mother’s on her way out soon. We’ll make a new life for ourselves

off the shoulder of Orion, or in an alleyway, or on the moon, dislodged from its orbit
spiraling in toward the city. This may be why you have stopped believing me.

The way poetry can take a simple tale and make it seem like some lost civilization
in ruin, where what we really do is move through life like spaceships in a vacuum.

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George Moore’s poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Antigonish Review, Dublin Quarterly, North American Review, Colorado Review, and Blast. Nominated in the last year for Pushcart Prizes, Best of Web and Best of the Net awards, The Rhysling Poetry Award, and the Wolfson Poetry Prize, his most recent collection, Children’s Drawings of the Universe, will be published by Salmon Poetry Ltd. in 2012. Moore teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder.