She is so old her teeth rattle in the cage of her wild experiences
so old that her offspring are marble

and carry their names carved in a forgotten memorial
At the time that I was a boy she lived among the dinosaurs

and could speak a language of some distant islands that no one knew but her
and it was beautiful like the keys of an electric organ danced away on their own

And she said little otherwise and spent the day witnessing each small change
from the center of the universe in an old sunken chair

and if she recognized me it was always briefly like a light coming on
behind her eyes that filled the room and everything was a hundred years before

And now that she’s gone and the chair is gone and the house far away
and all the singing languages almost forgotten

I see that she was sewing the lives of the house together
through the weaving of each word into a line and a verse or two

in a language that has come to haunt me as I travel in search of it
at the heart of a vanished world that is yet the center of the house

George Moore’s poetry appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Orion, Antigonish Review, Colorado Review and Stand. Collections include Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016). A finalist for The National Poetry Series and nine Pushcart Prizes, he now lives in Nova Scotia.