In the Room with Saint Augustine
Sometimes the spoons are filled with despair
at the breakfast table
and the bowls howl
their one long low note
Did I tell you (after she died)
I never missed my mother?
After she died
Overhear other woman missing their mothers
Do I believe them?
Yes Not really
Maybe
I’m jealous
(The wallpaper weeps)
Sometimes when the night crawls by
Under the moon’s raw blade, the bottle
Grows understandable
Good night
Good girl
(I mean to wake up)
Did I tell you times come
When I hate poetry?
So impractical
Disturbs the psyche
Better to plow a field
But then the trees
Their sway
Their reach
Even their sere cackling
How they lift
To the blazing blue
with its clouds heaving
Believe everything all over again
At the breakfast table
A Calm Madness
“ . . . I sought wisdom . . . in poems and also a certain calm madness.” Adam Zagajewski
Mozart surely felt it and tried to annihilate
that stolid fervor in his Requiem
and the birds churn it when dawn’s pallor
sieves the trees. It’s there when enlightenment
baptizes the confused brow of the seeker.
If you weep at the wood thrush’s song,
you are stung by it. And it simmers in
the horse’s eye, though the breath is soft
with sun and hay. For some it is the blue of far
mountains and the sea’s restless grieving.
Caravaggio found it in the violent
light emboldening human flesh for all
to behold. For such beauty, you have
to be mad. Or it would kill you.
Bluebirds
The air is wet with moist heat on this clouded
late May day.
I’m not sure if it’s welcoming
or not. If I had to say, I think it tastes like grief even
though the birds are going about their business
as usual and my heart still beats. The bluebird house
in the back yard remains empty after
my beloved and I tacitly agreed
to purge the wren’s 6 tiny brown eggs
in her lovingly piled
pyramid of twigs, hoping for the brighter beauties.
I watched his hand clasp the nest
and toss it into the woods. Earlier this week
a child smeared herself with another’s
blood to avoid the gunman’s ire. I think
it is going to rain if it makes its mind up
and there will be no bluebirds
in this house of death.
Raphael Kosek is the author of AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two prize-winning chapbooks, HARMLESS ENCOUNTERS (2022) and ROUGH GRACE (2014).