The Sign, by Mary B. Moore

Untitled, Taken as US Pandemic Deaths Reach 243,580, photography by Gerrie Paino (USA) 2020. Artist's Caption, "I do not lead or follow. I follow my own path."

The Sign 
  
The edges toothed, the wooden board faces us 
bearing two white squares, angular 
 
states, maybe Tennessee, 
Nevada.  They’re mute, the words 
 
worn away, and where eyes would be, 
two nail holes like pupils look out. 
 
Fall hasn’t yet browned the pasture beyond, 
where a mound is barely visible. 
 
Ohio is rife with earthworks 
the Mound Builders left, 
 
their giant snake effigy  
near Chillicothe visible from the air. 
 
The sign’s eyes say blind 
and nail-in-your-eye.   
 
Close up the wood grain is linear 
but wavers at the hairline, 
 
gradually slopes down and roils 
around an empty knot-hole where 
 
a mouth might open: Oh, it says, all ardor  
or surprise, worn and shorn  
 
of language’s complexity.  
The crooked, stiff vines behind, 
 
four or five, cut anywhichway,  
stick out, wiry hairs pulled, quirked: sign  
 
of madness or ravishment 
or martyrdom, 
 
since Oh can go so many ways. 
Maybe the pupils aren’t nailheads 
 
but holes invisible bullets riddled 
the sign with, as they did 
 
the first people––Shawnee,  
Chippewa, Miami–– 
 
small pox, the common cold. 
My eyes ache. I can’t look away. 
 
Mary B. Moore

 *“Invisible bullets” is scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s metaphor for the common cold’s effects on native Americans.  

Mary B. Moore’s poetry books include Dear If, (forthcoming, Orison Books); Flicker (Dogfish Head Prize, 2016); The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State UP, 1997).  Chapbooks, both prize winners, are Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys 2017) and Eating the Light (Sable Books 2016). Recent poems also appear in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, ekphrastic.net, Nelle, Terrain, Georgia Review, 32 Poems, The Nasty Woman Poet anthology, and more.  A retired professor, she lives in Huntington WV.