Catalogue of What We Want and Cannot Hold

“This is what language is: a habitable grief.” — Eavan Boland

I.
Minor lunar triumph: small-fry celestial event
gone digital. On Earth, Longhorns doze in the shadows of retired rockets,
conspicuous mammalian stillness eclipsing
robots who zip hither & thither (chutzpah of toddlers, precision of rivers).
Notwithstanding the standard phrase, the kids
might or might not be alright.

II.
Words again demand we agglomerate. Was it only yesterday?
Some new/old language kerfuffle crested? Allez!
Canadiens Allez! shrieks in our city until autumn. The consensus:
we are tumbling out of clown cars.

III.
Go, dog, go! (First studied sentence.) Moon pronounced moont (first spoken
word), sounding like burnt, becoming toast, becoming sable orbit body.

IV.
Today they found Valerie, the dachshund who ran wild and wildly on a wild island
among wild animals for 529 days. Now she begins her transition.

V.
I lost all my mother once and, though she’s here on Earth, I haven’t found her yet.

VI.
Small domestic wounds cluster for roll call, measurement.
Bigger than a breadbox? No smaller —
size of squirrel, mouse, garter snake. Neighbours relinquish
postpartum items, ask for metal cages. The quotidian churn tumbles
against the wider grief.

VII.
Today they buried the Pope in a humble grave, humble a humble mid-alphabet
word he embodied. To wit: he blessed the mothers to nurse their young in holy
spaces. Godspeed! Pope Godspeed!

VIII.
I lost my child once but found them later when I plunged into a sudden
tangerine ether. Now the fragrant mist has lifted. Now I stand again aslant.

IX.
The day is long, the week, the winter, the decade, time.
Just ask the calcic hollow you pocketed at the shoreline. Just ask the moon
who waits in cold dust for what mess we’ll make.

X.
We have so many nicknames for the dog, we keep a ledger.
We have so many nicknames for god, it’s hard to be good.

XI.
(Children love the muck of planets. See it on their hands when they are born.)

XII.
Perhaps the first wolf to approach the flames became Pup-pup or Ruggles,
eroding fear, amplifying taste for cooked meat. Stiff lexical cabinet for affection:
hypocorism. Coodle-bum, Rita-ita-ita-boo. So unlike the soft animal of its body.

XIII.
Yesterday, Valerie came home.

XIV.
It’s April. We unzip winter, take it to the dry cleaner. We wring out record-breaking
snows that turned city plows milquetoast. Taxes are due. And tick medicine.
Somewhere the resident groundhog quadruple lutzes in the furrowed chamber
of its cranium, thinking perhaps of kale, of how its fuzzy kind
survived the age of dinosaurs.

XV.
Despite the shell in your pocket,
we inhabit an age of micro-eras. Welcome
to whimsigoth, warcore. Welcome home,
Valerie. Take as much time as you need
with your rotisserie chicken, your wild pain.

The phrase “the soft animal of its body” is borrowed from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”
(Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).