Catch
I’d spent the morning trying
to sketch a cat, but in the dream
that night was a different cat, paw
caught in its collar. When I woke,
because I am a poet I wrote,
the cat has a poem caught in its collar.
Collar suggesting the yoke of domesticity.
Cat sharing the first syllable of my own name.
In the dream the cat was black and white—
I’m a Libra—and while the situation
was clear and my helping instinct strong,
I hesitated, having always both loved and feared
the unpredictable animal of my own nature.
I’d wanted to sketch a cat not catch it,
to capture in graphite its curves and markings
not hold its creaturely panic in my arms.
When I freed the paw, what I felt was
the poem drawn from my body by its claws.
Roses
The roses are sick but bud anyway on defoliated stems.
They won’t last long.
Only every other button needs to know,
I mean no one does,
as I am alone
and neither hot nor cold
with no corporeal desire except to live in peace.
Murders everywhere.
And though they bloom with abandon this spring
the poppies are not a symbol because blood is not.
I am trying very hard not
to wish harm on those who profit from others’ losses
as if they held doctorates in money and still don’t know what blood costs.
The roses were planted with fish heads,
their eyes surprised by soil as it fell. I turned my eyes away
again and again. To classrooms, bedrooms, galleries, and bone rooms.
The inscription above the skeleton reads:
I was once what you are and what I am you will also be.
The dead are not a symbol. The roses are not
because our lives are not.
Hospice
The oxygen is louder than you think breath should be.
And the figure on the bed appears more and less
Like themself, as those hovering near urge upon
The dying one both more life and easeful passage,
Slipping into past tense as they speak, trying
On loss like a parent’s shoes. While the parent, without
Need of shoes, might say if they spoke, Keep them,
They fit you well.
