Hallie Moore
With Gratitude
(to Masefield, Jeffers, Hass, and Snyder)
Poets trap nature under bell jars,fence daffodils in words, exactly there when we need to pull yellow and innocence from our January pockets. They salt and soak metaphors until our fishy selves long for surf. Even in Iowa we may go down to the sea in ships twist our faces into the whetted-knife wind, smell salt spray rattling the sail. Here in Texas, riding west over hardpan expanse, in the ragged heat of the Trans Pecos flats, its eternal haze-gripped miles of juniper and scrub oak, monochrome dust and scattered pinyon pines, my eyes close, my head tilts back and I peer into my bell jar: Jam my hands in my pockets like Jeffers, teetering in the chill wind on Big Sur's granite cliffs, shouting over the ocean's crashing. Feel tender and tempted to take Hass's hand on the foggy Marin headlands as we stoop over a squat succulent whose name he knows. Scramble up the steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country, through High Sierra lodge pole pine with Gary Snyder, inhaling the sharp resin. In the dust whirl of prairies, I long for coastal cypress, bent and whipped west on the continent's edge. Wild water. Flannel fog. Ancient redwoods. Too immense for bell jars yet gratefully ensnared in words. Hallie Moore, raised in Washington State and educated in California (Stanford University, BS, MA; Antioch University Los Angeles, MFA), now calls the Texas Gulf Coast home. Most recently she is the winner of the 2013 Blue Light Press Chapbook contest . Her poetry is currently on display in Houston on an 84 foot photo wall on Main Street . Other work has appeared in The Texas Review, Borderlands, Spillway, Blue Mesa Review, Calyx, Moondance, The Adirondack Review, Suddenly, etc. A teacher and workshop leader, she has taught English in California, Brazil, Singapore, and Texas.
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