Moment Poem by Conor Dowd

And in this moment now,
now everything is rich and real and vital
and slow and cinematic:
a baby's cry, a mother's tears, a host of bloody susets -
a catalogue like glue that holds the world together
when they avalanche asunder
and stun me with their vibrancy.

In a lamplight slight and warm
she stands before me in October twilight,
which mirrors each dumb longing,
each tremor and escape.

Outside myself
I see myself,
my hand poised to move in frenzy or in fever,
moving swiflty,
a rise and fall,
a dawn, a dusk,
a day, a night,
in an audible cadence of rhythm,
creating and conceiving her,
and I her mad, fond Pygmalion,
and now she stands:
my fiction come to life.

My eyes greet a lamplit world of worn yellow,
all flimsy, fierce and fragile.
But imagination is a deadly thing and if I stop to think
I know my house of cards will fall,
if I try to understand I fail.
And this new world lethal, bloody and real.

But what I recall most vividly
in clear and crisp impressions
are the smallest traces of
what the world would lable dull or insignificant
and how perplexing these are
because the most beautiful things in the world
are beautiful because of their banality,
their ordinary charm,
because revelation lies on words
and through another's eyes you glimpse an oracle.