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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: The Plymouth On Ice
Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
In our first poem of the new year, Thomas Moore of Brooksville looks back on the risks he and his friends once took as they glided over the ice holding ropes behind a Plymouth in the dark. Note how Moore imitates the dangers he describes with long sentences that turn sharply at line breaks and leap across stanzas.
The Plymouth On Ice by Thomas R. Moore
On frigid January nights we’d take my ’forty-eight Plymouth onto the local reservoir, lights off to dodge the cops, take turnsholding long manila lines in pairs behind the car, cutting colossal loops and swoons across the crackly range of ice. OhGod, did we have fun! At ridges and fissures we careened, tumbled onto each other, the girls yelping, splayed out on all fours,and sometimes we heard groans deep along the fracture lines as we spun off in twos, to paw, clumsy, under parkas, never thinking oflove’s falls or how thin ice would ease us into certain death. No, death was never on our minds, we were eighteen, caterwaulingunder our own moon that warded off cops and front-page stories of six kids slipping under the fickle surface.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2010 by Thomas R. Moore. Reprinted from The Bolt Cutters, Fort Hemlock, 2010, by permission of Thomas R. Moore. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to David Turner, Special Assistant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at poetlaureate@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263.
