April 2
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	george moore
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	AT THE END OF THE SENTENCE
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	Gravitational waves originating some distance From what seems relevant here Could be a supernova we forgot in the grammar. Or, oops, I felt that. The conjunction was outspoken Enough to forego the mechanics of conclusions. I believe you said. We were sharing the telescope. Your left hand was on the shoulder of Orion. I asked if you could think of it in another way As a kind of chaos getting used to the patterns. You swore it was that mania for order That creeps in every time you start a sentence. I just swore. No matter. Then, for a long time I waited For the light to arrive from a distant quadrant. Biding my time by weaving loops of self-evident Meaning. And finally you had to ask, Did you mean to leave out the word love? Or was it merely jarred loose and lost In the aftermath of the moment of creation?
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	about the poem
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	"At the End of the Sentence" started, as many poems do for me, with a connection, imagined or real, between how we say things, even distant things at the edge of the universe (hence the title, which should suggest the recognizable phrase: "at the end of the universe"). Poems like this one grow out of possibilities rather than single inspirations, I think. I have recently been fascinated with gravity waves, or the theoretical (thus far) idea that gravity takes the shape of waves or particles. Because Einstein saw time as gravity itself--gravity is the fabric of spacetime--it strikes me that we often talk about things in old ways (Newtonian ideas of endless time) when we experience them perhaps in newer or ever-changing ways. The distance between seeing and the thing itself has also always fascinated me. So Orion appears to us every night in winter, climbs the sky in a familiar fashion, and yet exists in its actuality only generations and generations of lifetimes away. For all we know, Orion's stars could have all gone cold a million years ago. That fascinates me. Language is at the heart of this, too, because we speak a common vocabulary of stars and distances, or time and space, and yet is it ever more than an echo or shadow of what really exists? "At the End of the Sentence" then, is about that hint of meaning that exists at the end of language, a reflection, perhaps, of the hint of that greater something that exists out there.
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	about the poet
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	George Moore is a senior instructor and lecturer at the University of Colorado (Boulder). His poems have been published in a wide variety of top literary journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The North American Review, and many others. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including most recently the CD chapbook Tree in the Wall (2006) and the e-book All Night Card Game in the Backroom of Time (2006), as well as the full-length collections Headhunting (2002), The Petroglyphs at Wedding Rocks & Other Poems (1997), and The Long Way Around (1992). He has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Brittingham Poetry Award, and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. Mr. Moore is also an avid motorcyclist, and has written a guide to riding in the mountains and desert, called The Lone Rider's Guide to the American West. He currently lives in Lyons, Colorado.
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