More on: Poetry

We can’t love

an abstraction. So, I begin with my cats.

This much is certain
to me: Prayer ends up
somewhere, like the bright
death throes of a star

Blasphemers in taverns slurred sacred hymns and the lame lay bellowing on the steps to shrines where beggars repented prideful sins.

Could she
make an excuse and stay home this year?
Get out of playing happy, the happy family?

Two years after the Pot Peak fire
the color returns to the wheat.

Cliff walls ascending, seagulls
ascending, skyward and calling out, circling over
the schools of herring and diving again to the sea.

But art aspires—art is only human.

Mortals are not designed to bask in joy,
though life be only borne by dreams of it.

An atom
is a fantastic
abacus,

In my dream, W.H. Auden and his husband
are talking about how much they enjoy playing house
in the ersatz suburb where I grew up.