Cabin Fever

All I wanted was a little cabin with a mud floor and us:
an inside and an outside—as simple as that.
And outside would be splendour and inside would be bliss.

You looked at the stars and wondered at your happiness
I looked at my happiness and wondered at the stars
and that was that and this is this.

I would still toil in your garden and work in your basement
to be near you. And you would bring me a cold glass
and your children would be beside you. Heaven

is still as simple as you say it is, moving soil around
until your garden’s planet Earth, major navel: air-cord
for dark astronauts at the moments of their birth.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2007

A Note to P in Anticipation of Our Visit to the Met

Art galleries are funny places.
There’s a touch of expiation and atonement in the air.
Van Gogh, belatedly beatified, his muddy boots in the corner
an odd contrast to new shoes which, while gazing at Pink Poplars
sound like birds. This is no place to bend the knee
but stand straight and breathe deep,
a repository for you my visitor to look into my eyes
and see that which is shielded not just between you and the stranger
in the subway but wedging husband and wife apart
and worse, between our own selves and our longing
for things that cannot be had because we lack the ability to focus
having lost the context. Observe here now in contradistinction
the whole soul incarnate, matter once dumb now speaking. See?
There is no escaping the creation, the miracle.
Did I say this is no church? I only said the clay,
the breath, the stars and we are one.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2007