The Universe seems too big for God.
All those multi-trillion miles
of flaming gases, massive like
a billion suns descending over
Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago,
burning the liberal preacher
and his writs, the keen saw of Newton
shaving Occam's butt.
But then
I find frogosto by the door,
panting righteously from the
innocuous cat; the frayed young
red-bird by the library window,
impossible to approach or leave
to flaming concrete facts. That
which I remember has no poetic
meaning, only bones and atoms
and quarks and antinutrinos
sleeping. I find Updike a bore:
give me more Miller Williams
when he was young and quite genuine
ly whoring. Please whisper to the
horse: run quickly before an an
nilist does the math. Hawking this,
ratio to fringe: so long suckers.
Hello Yahweh and Lou Costello.
I spend Heisenberg's principal
on kitty litter.

 

I saw the thin black racer
pulling herself along College Street
—a bitch beaten hard by heat and cars,
hoisting along on three legs
and holding up a dangling
front paw
like an empty purse.

No money in that dangling bag—
no hope for the Kal-Kan future—
only a nose for the invisible gone north
and some distant, luckless dog's day-dream
impossible now to achieve
on those ugly legs.
My own head, a Palestinian, dangled on its chain.