The Soft Galaxy (Eulogy for a Chicken)

I’m still thinking of what was happening in Roadrunner’s mind the other day, standing five feet from the back door to the house, on a stoop two steps above the ground, facing the door as if wanting to come in. Every time I think of it, I feel sad – sadder than someone raised in a culture of scientific materialism blended with Catholic ideas about the specialness of humans is really supposed to feel about a chicken.

Chrysanthemums from The Milky Way

Now riding the FRTA bus from Northampton to Greenfield
obsessively revising a poem on my phone
the bus rattling with ferocity
like a small traveling earthquake of metal

other passengers staring off or into
the blue-ish ghost light of their own phones
all of us being ferried loudly across the Route 5 of forgetting
that runs parallel to the Connecticut River.