“Starry Night,” oil on canvas, by Józef Marian Chełmoński, 1888.
Kneeling to untangle my dog’s leg from its leash,
how did I get here, walking a pit bull in the dark
under the sour leaves of drought resistant Texas oaks?
How have these years colluded to put me
with a woman who doesn’t like to be touched
as if my life were still attached
to a former life, lived in felt robes, kneeling,
questioningly, before God’s dead silence?
Why do I sometimes whisper beatitudes in Latin
when grinding roasted coffee beans for breakfast?
Why can’t a fuck be just a fuck like breathing
or the necessary forward movement of starlight
entering my eyes from Polaris when I look up?
Why is my life so intertwined that it folds me
into fractal compartments that expand, as if
from each decision, outward, new enclosures grip me
as I venture forward, faster than any logic I can conjure?
Should I kill politicians to address society’s wrongs?
Or open a shop and sell cracked imported Chinese
Chia Pets? Or get to the lunar surface to erase
the names of loved ones astronauts left behind?
How can this sticky motion of salt and water
hoisted on these dry branches of bone
discern a purpose, lost among thin pricks of starlight
that amble like ancient animals into the night?
After a thirty year career as a software engineer, Kurt Lovelace returned to school to pursue his passion for mathematics and classics, and is currently a student in the Honors College at the University of Houston, where he has most recently studied poetry under Tony Hoagland and Kevin Prufer. He lives with his wife and daughter in Houston, Texas.
