August 19, 2016 nytimes.com
Richard O. Moore (1920-2015) was a pioneering documentary filmmaker and a public-radio and television executive. He wrote poetry for more than 50 years, choosing to publish his only two books in the last five years of his life.
This poem is from a sequence of sonnets about the consequences of losing his sight in old age.
Poem selected by Matthew Zapruder.
Credit Illustration by R. O. Blechman
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/21/magazine/richard-o-moore-the-familiar-has-taken-leave.html
The Familiar Has Taken Leave
Responding to a world turned outside in
Requires a fresh agility of will
And a surreal mode of thought, both distant
When the world was visible and real.
The only carry-over is the sound:
The hollow clatter of the commonplace,
Ancestral voices, sepulchral complaints
From many sources now invisible.
This is the most dispassionate I can be.
The familiar has taken leave with all I know
And what is left is mostly echo fading,
Never to return. What takes shape then
Is virtual and is a world apart
Assembled half by memory, half by art.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, “Sun Bear.” He teaches poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California and is editor at large at Wave Books. Richard O. Moore died in 2015, shortly before his second collection of poems, “Particulars of Place,” was published by Omnidawn.