POETs OF THE DAY: Ruth Moose and Jeff Davis

Ruth Moose has taught creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill since l996. She received a McDowell Colony Fellowship and most recently, in 2008, a Chapman Fellowship for teaching. Ruth is the author of two books of short stories, The Wreath Ribbon Quilt (St. Andrews Press) and Dreaming in Color (August House) as well as five other poetry collections. TEA and other assorted poems is a follow up to her extremely successful book The Librarian and other poems, published in 2009 by Main Street Rag. Her poems and stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Prairie Schooner, Yankee, The Nation,Christian Science Monitor among other places. Her stories have been published in England, Holland, South Africa, and Denmark.

Fiddleheads

soft gray

numb, dumb thumbs

poking from brown leaves

uncurling like baby's fingers

unfurling plumes of green

biology. My class drew

the life cycle of a fern.

At fifteen

what did I know of wonder?

Dahlias

My mother

arms loaded

with their scrolled

petals magenta, fuschia, purple

bent in a vase doily laced table

cradle stroked them

staked their heavy heads

cool as taffeta

button buds

fringed

green thumbs

white vase flaring

out like a trumpet

her hand, her hands

now twisted like welks.

Jeff Davis and I were in graduate school together back in the '60s, sitting in the same poetry workshop in the graduate writing program at UNC-Greensboro. Jeff hosts and produces Wordplay, a program featuring poets and other writers. It now airs at 6:00 p.m Sundays via www.AshevilleFM.org. A catalog of shows is at www.naturespoetry.blogspot.com. A chapbook, Transits of Venus, appeared in 1005 and Natures in 2006.

The Cotyledon

_

Two lovers lie

together, like two

leaves

inside the finished seed

bound asleep

to the root

the long tunnels

& subway

paths

that end nowhere:

a door

through which each day

drop by drop

a river seeps from the rock

and rises

through their

flesh into morning.

The Bridge

The syntax of a magnolia

unravels in the dream

each flower passes into

a trajectory

through forms

a long bridge

leads from the earth

through these limbs

all built

by the eye of the seed

turned in the root's spiral

from veil to

veil

a bridge cast

from the ash of

the flower

grateful

dead charred

petals channel the air.

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