Poetry by William Rieppe Moore

William Rieppe Moore is from Richland County, South Carolina, and moved to Unicoi County, Tennessee, with his wife. He resumed to teaching high school English after earning an MA in English from East Tennessee State University. Moore's poetry has received various honors, including Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations as well as finalist honors in the Ron Rash Award in Poetry and second place in the George Scarbrough Prize for Poetry. His poems appear in Driftwood, Blue Earth Review, Appalachian Places, James Dickey Review, North American Review, and Terrain.org.

Drowning Ford, Virginia

It shouldn’t be a wonder that
my pot likker tastes like it came

from the percolator or that
my dippler’s depths are off.

The land has tilted my eyes
like the acorns, nearly mast now,

that rolled to the foot path
to be trampled from their pink

patina, or whole, for jaybirds to
collect in feathers seared by

many skies. Harvesting to oak hollows
they flit, Hit ‘m a lick, hit ‘m a lick;

bullyin’ sparrows and wrens,
or chasin’ a screech owl to

the outer dark of inner woods
where it can hone its call to

the wang of wild greens in its chest,
wang that stings a little bit.

Beefhide, Kentucy

Now that silver maples’ colors
change leaves to lemony shades,

visitors will come roadside again
to pick their own pockets in

these windswept towns, dyin’ to live
up to their ancestors’ lives:

there’s a straight seam of wood
in every burl—a frozen current in

Mother of Pearl; fumes rise
with velvet musk from a split

hemlock, smellin’ like a culture of
mother on pickled beans and corn;

and there will be a word for wind,
the thwank of its branches

against the trunk of the house
will show the shape of itself

in my dreams tonight, before
its breezes bring leaf-ruin rain.