INTRODUCING GARY WORTH MOODY

Meet New Mexico poet Gary Worth Moody, a falconer, who lives in Santa Fe with the artist and writer Oriana Rodman, three dogs and a red-tailed hawk.  Gary’s worked as a grain elevator pit-man, forest-fire fighter, cowboy, teamster driving clydesdales, apprentice farrier, horse trainer, logger, CAT operator, form carpenter and construction project manager.  He spent a year in Siberia in 1993 building a town for coal-miners.  He is the founder of the 1980s Lost River Poetry Workshops and the past recipient of the Austin Poetry Prize, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Poetry Prize and the Virginia Downs Poetry Award.

Of Gary Worth Moody’s new book, HAZARDS OF GRACE, Stephen Bodio writes:

In a time when so much poetry is weak tea, as minimalist as haiku but without that compressed density, [Moody’s] comes on like a rare, old bourbon, rich and complex and burning like fire.  Its view of the mortality of everything is unflinching and sometimes startling, even as it celebrates life in its infinite varieties.  HAZARDS OF GRACE is the most original poetic debut I have read in years.”

Click here to see HAZARDS OF GRACE at Amazon.com

Here’s a sample of Gary Worth Moody’s poetry, with its signature attention to detail and rich musicality of its language.  “Solace” is from his new book, HAZARDS OF GRACE.

SOLACE

After last night’s late autumn lightning and bars of rain

            hewn to prismed spines of feathered ice,

two dogs and I crest a red cindered rise.

Thin twined shadows of their leashes tighten, release,

            then tighten again. We descend

through frosted chamisa, cholla and buffalo

grass into an arroyo’s storm washed sand. Everywhere

            gleam shards of quartz and flint.

The earth’s iced rind holds a cuneiform of tracks, nascent scents,

signs of predawn human and animal migrations.

            Each draws the dogs’ noses,

and my eyes, to November’s first killing frost’s radiant skin.

Beyond juniper shadow, I note where a hare swerved

            from under the cold of a Red-tail’s wing.

Here a coyote’s acid breath warmed a struggling vole.

The only hint of solace, a withered condom of liquid moon,

            shielded beneath a tarp’s ragged scrim,

nests in a vacant imprint of two bodies that made love in cold rain.

Now, in wind-shorn embrace of a distant piñon snag,

            the frantic beak of a cooper’s hawk tears

hearts, quill and breath from the ravaged husk of a mourning dove.

The hawk’s eye and the scaled eye of the dove each mock

            the frailty of our leashed trespass

into wilderness. I bend through my own breath’s fog,

unclasp each leash, watch my shadow uncurl as, under echoed

            cry of ascending hawk, the dogs run, and I,

facing unbroken sun, with upslope wind, begin the solitary walk back home.

Gary Worth Moody

From HAZARDS OF GRACE  (Red Mountain Press, 2012)

EKPHRASIS III: RACHEL OF ARLES

Here’s one, a combination of ekphrasis and a persona poem (in the voice of someone else) from my van Gogh book of poems.  [This my final post in a short series on ekphrasis.]

RACHEL OF ARLES

                                                I begin,

Vincent, to regard your closeness

in matched colors: stormy sky

blue eyes, the orange of your beard.

                        Some days you entered

full of sunflowers, those big ugly eyes

that watched while walls had ears

for the wild side.

                                    Your head

not yet a hill of bandages,

you saw how Rachels often end up empty

and whispered about a wedding of two

complementary colors.

                                                And I half-

hearing you rave late into night

about the fullness of color: how grays glow

with a bridelike blush and yellow in woodwork

wavers out and into shadows.

                                                With your scent

of turpentine, absinthe and death, you gave me

more than I bargained for.  The Christmas

you brought me the razored section

of your left ear, I turned away,

not wanting to see what wasn’t there.

-- Lenny Lianne

This poem of mine is almost thirty years old.  Though it’s gone through many revisions, the poem always has been spoken by Rachel.

Who was Rachel?  According to the brief police report printed in the Arles newspaper the day after Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his earlobe, he gave the section of ear to a certain Rachel, a prostitute. 

Vincent cut off part of his ear on Christmas Eve and gave it to Rachel as a token of himself, or perhaps as a Christmas present.

How did I come to write this poem?  When I lived in Northern Virginia, and before I started taking courses toward in MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry), I often took courses at the Washington Writers Center, now in Bethesda, Maryland.  One of those brief courses was “Nothing but Words,” taught by Rod Jellema, a fine poet and teacher.  One evening he gave a six-minute writing exercise whose instructions were:

1.     Write in the present tense.

2.     Use concrete, specific words; no abstractions

3.     Try to use all of these words:

mouth

ache (as a verb)

star

pin

strip (as a verb)

hill

trouble.

After six minutes of writing, I had the first draft of the poem which, twenty-five years and quite a few revisions later, would appear in my second book, FRENZY OF COLOR, REVERIE OF LINE.


Click here to go to Amazon and see my book.


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