Priest
Marble hands
carefully arranged in
his lap clutch the
cat like bible, run
a comforting thumb down
its worn spine, though he
knows it’s been taught
not to purr.
Once, living on the West Coast of New Zealand the power went out in an old house huddled in a crowd of ancient trees. It was properly cold, and the rain pounded at the dusk dark roof, desperately wanting in. The asthmatic heater had blown a fuse again and waist deep in the gloom and murk Craig wrote a poem by candlelight, about having many books of poetry (Horace, Shakespeare, Basho, Brautigan, Sam Hunt and so on), but no fuse wire. Not much has changed except now he lives in Sydney, sells books instead of collecting them and fuses have evolved to have a reset switch, instead of a fragile spine of wire wound carefully around a ceramic plug. We are in the marvellous future!
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