ELLENE GLENN MOORE
DRIVING THE BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY ABOVE ASHEVILLE
This is a different kind of deliverance;
not from circumstance, but from ourselves.
Winter light turns the bare-boned trees into quicksilver.
Everything important rises to the top—the early leaves,
white bone of a deer carcass cresting in a hollow,
peering through the limbs of the just-budded rhododendron
to watch water plunge through the gorge
like everything tender and fatal coursing between us now.
It echoes, even in this thin air. None of this is spontaneous.
It is incessant. It cuts its path.
DRIVING THROUGH BIG SUR
In time we stop again, sun low as ripe fruit,
mountainside flush
with blond poppy or shank.
Nobody told us about the moon,
its voice sounding over the incessant ocean.
The rocks in the sea make eddies and foam
as we rush into their slow darkening, luminous as stones
the sea forgot to pocket.
ELLENE GLENN MOORE is a poet living in sunny South Florida. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University, where she held a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, and her BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Raleigh Review, Brevity, Best New Poets, Spillway, Chautauqua, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.