Diane Lee Moomey has lived and wandered around the United States and Canada and now dips her gardener’s hands in California dirt. A regular reader at San Francisco Bay Area poetry venues, she has had her work published in Mezzo Cammin, The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura, Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. In 2016, 2017, and 2018, she won prizes and honors in sonnet and creative non-fiction categories of the Soul Making Keats Literary Contest. Her most recent poetry book is Nothing But Itself, published by Day’sEye Press and Studios. Other book titles include Figure in a Landscape, Love's House, and Nothing But Itself. To know more, please visit https://www.pw.org/content/diane_moomey Diane is also a watercolorist and collage artist, an experience that both seeds and is seeded by, her poetic imagery. To view her artwork, please visit www.dianeleemoomeyart.com

Water Above, Water Below

      from I Ching, Hexagram #29, K’an K’an: Danger

The lights are going out, dear—one

by one. Circuits short—listen! the crack

of lines downed, drowned by water rising

from the dark beneath our feet. Wicks,

damp, go limp, collapse in lipid puddles,

hissing. Flashlights flicker, fail in swamps 

new-made by dams broken, oaths broken.

Water goes where water will, filling:

water mixed with gas, soaking wood,

bringing to the surface pestilence

once hid. Listen! filaments of bulbs—

bright, the wires thin as hairs—now snap.

Tungsten ringlets droop. One shakes the glass

in disbelief—only tinkling

within. The lamps are going out, dear,

one by precious one and it’s for us

to choose to live in darkness or, blind

and trembling, make for higher ground 

and set ourselves alight.

—First appeared in Caesura, Summer 2018

Climbing to the Ceiling of the Gym

Left hand, right hand pulls her up; both

feet cup the wrist-thick rope and push;

sisal prickles like a cowhide—

bristles strip the tender skin from child

thighs bare below the hems of blue

shorts. Gym mats thin and few beneath—

she doesn’t think of falling. Every day

that length, calling: all the way, slap

the rafter, down again—resist the urge

to slide—she lets herself descend, ignores

admiring glares from other kids. That length—

enticing. Maybe on the hundredth climb

she’ll smack that beam, a trap door will fly open—

wide, flat roof! —and she’ll shuffle

sneakered feet through gravel, lift her arms

and soar away, like Wendy, above the chimneys

of Detroit.

 

—First appeared in Perfume River Poetry Review, Spring 2018

Sonnet, Forty-Three and One-Half 

                                                  on reading Millay #43  . . .

But I remember every lip, and where,

and all the hands that ever cupped my cheek;

recall the day and season bringing each

and bearing each away: our mingled hair,

an arm across me in the night,  the wary

promises we may have meant to keep;

remember canyons far too wide to leap

and lips, unkissed, that smiled across. This heart

has been no wide equator— endless vine

and leaf whose suns move gently south to north, 

timeless zone of valleys, verdant bowls

of fruit— but is the sleepless summer, time

between the thaw and freeze, brief bringing forth

of tiny berries, lights above the poles.

—First appeared in Mezzo Cammin, January 2017

 

Cusp

So now— when silence reigns upstairs,

demanding voices stilled in sleep

and dreams, when in this bare

and empty midnight every cup,

for once, is washed and rinsed, each mote

of dust swept up, the missing buttons

found and sewn and every weed

dispatched— the edge between tomorrow

and today rolls smooth  beneath

my fingers. Only now can I believe

in magma melting stone, in caves

of water miles below my feet.

And yes, I do believe I hear

the sigh of passing space, my planet

cycling, cycling at dizzy speed

around the sun.

—First appeared in Mezzo Cammin, January 2017

Nigiri

I thought we’d have more days.

I seem to be mistaking a night-bird’s voice

for yours. A branch, roof-fallen,

for a knock upon my door. Be fooled

by light and shadows on a wall— mere light

and shadow. By words I think are meant

for my ears, a crescent moon I take for ours.

The children of others.

You set the last nigiri on my plate

and filled my cup. I thought

we’d have more days.

—First appeared in PoeTalk, 2015

These poems also appear in Nothing But Itself, the 2018 book by the author. 

Copyright © Diane Lee Moomey.