If you’re gonna have a cat, then
Go on and have a cat.
Let your body fall backwards throughout itself,
Clean, out the window:
Dreamily to the ground and your
Certain death. No
Recourse. But
By
All
Means
Fall,
And have a cat near your heart for all life is sacred.
A lifetime of behavioral analysis suggests that when
A cat scrubs his ear with his paw
The ear is the problem.
Anytime I get up from a bedridden sickness I
Look at everything as a conglomeration of
Ideas
In which I’m never what’s wrong.
If the song wasn’t such a spell,
If the garden wasn’t too brief to be
Tended to by fleeting hands
If the stars were alive
If I didn’t fuck things up so miserably
The half-shell would yet rise with
My idea of conciliatory beauty
In its humble arm, just
Like a baby about to cry itself alive.
What dream of life do we fulfill when we carry this bride
Of possibility across the threshold?
Will we finally be safe? Will the snake finally
Speaky English?
Teach them, if you
Must, though it can’t be taught.
Learn with them, but fair warning,
You will learn alone.
You will walk yourself into circles, thinking,
Blue.
Explain this to me,
Two things that seem so innocuously
Similar in my mind, but set
Loose in the world of ideas,
They evolve in discord.
I tried to write a poem about the sun—
It was going to be apocalyptic, with children staring into
The vocal point of the volcanic Earth.
A robin blushing in opposition
But I began to think of a painting
John Singer Sargent did of leisure class
Children holding paper lamps after dark.
A robin, somewhere, against the might of a volcano
And suddenly I was cutting my heart in pieces
Against the grain. You see
I was trying to divide it equally.
The crest is bound to be covered with
Liars. No cameras on them.
Everybody is looking down from
Their orange spots
At the terrifying volcano, wondering,
How do we fix love without bothering
The heat we believe in?
I think of you anytime
I come across old score keepings
From card games, folded newspapers saved
For the crossword puzzle
In different states of completion. It’s
Hard
To remember in this state of grace that
We could ever gain so freely from nothing
And give so benevolently to it, as well.
Look at the numbers, blue and random now. Look at the
Clues as they bury the dead elsewhere.
