Poem

Catalogue

Jane would have liked that
gold moon in a sweet silver nightcap
clasping her cashmere lapel;

the carbon steel of a surgically
named garden tool; an ostrich
leather notebook; those pots of aloe.

Shopping for the dead soothes.
But on the duffer’s page,
with an electronic putting green

my father could have used at home,
I give up (I never gave him
anything extravagant) imagining

someone else’s desire, pleasure awful
and immoderate as breathing in
the sterile isolation ward

through a pleated white gauze mask.