Aubade
by Mary B. Moore
Karl foregoes jogging today, burps
the coffee carafe for one more slug
of umber pluck, and brief-cases, lunch-bags
it out the door, into the Sacramento sun,
the understoried sycamore and elm,
the hydrangea-blue skies. He pauses in the Subaru.
Wishes catch up with him, wannabes.
He’s ariaed a few, poemed some.
Two cardinals red-shoe the bare oak limb,
red song, red wing. A phoebe tuxedoes the eave.
What they be, they do. Karl hums
the tenor part from Aida,
seconds the first tenor, keys
the ignition, sings and is singing.
Mary B. Moore’s second full-length collection, Flicker, won the Dogfish Head Award (judges, Carol Frost, Baron Wormser, and Jan Beatty), and the chapbook Eating the Light, won the Sable Books’ Award (judge, Allison Joseph): both appeared in 2016. Cleveland State published The Book of Snow (1998). Georgia Review, Poem/Memoir/Story, Cider Press Review, Drunken Boat, Birmingham Poetry Review published recent poems. She won Second in the 2017 Pablo Neruda Poetry Contest’s Second Place Award.