Particular Beauties

By Howard Moss 1922–1987 Howard Moss

Whether it was a particular beauty

Stirred the tearfall from the eyelid’s rim,

Rinsing the world once more with self,

Was it not there the general peered,

Thousand-eyed, down from the peak

In the last of all imaginary sunsets?

The light divided in half, the half

Divided again in half, the way

Zeno’s paradox makes nothing move

Because an infinity of points between

Target and arrow, though never seen,

Exists. And there is snow in a capsule,

A solid floor of individual

Flakes that, shaken, settle in a field—

Parachutists growing where the grass,

One moment before, was only natural.

I am speaking now of the diminishment

Or enhancement of enchanted objects,

Of how they turn into nothingness

Or burnish the imagination:

A fire at the bottom of the sea,

For instance, or a mind in space

Thinking its way into science fiction,

Or, inside the skull, a little world

Clinging, about to be thrown away—

Miraculous lint under a bell.

Source: New Selected Poems (Atheneum Publishers, 1985)

Biography

Howard Moss was the poetry editor of the New Yorker for almost forty years. In that influential capacity, this quiet, unassuming man was one of the key figures in American letters in the late twentieth century, boosting the careers of many young poets by publishing their work in one of the few mass circulation magazines which bought poetry and paid well for it. Writing in World Literature Today, Ashley Brown observed that "it . . .

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