Catherine Bull is a poet lately of Portland, Oregon. She has traveled in Australia, Britain, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, and New Zealand, and and has driven across the United States five or so times. She has recent work in Beatdom and FIELD, teaches on occasion at the Attic Institute in Portland, and writes about poetry and poetics, plus film reviews here. She has appropriately literary degrees from Oberlin College and U.C. Davis.
We followed her in, a stray, the fattest & first, the temple cat./ In a niche by the altar she crouches, watches them come: the/ mad parade we’d wanted, this troupe of heretics — the ass,/ alpaca, gyrfalcon — unbroken line of celebrants, creatures ...
Mother comes to me as I’m making honey cake, / measuring out sugar then whipping eggs. / Never mind that Mother left this earth / eighteen months earlier...
I miss things: swooping, diving, passionate voices/ in several African tongues, so far beyond me/ they might as well have beamed from the constellations.
Here’s the river I stepped in more than twice.// I can’t see them but I know the boats/ are going by in the sturdy fog...
And now you explore the hidden pockets and come up/ with a City Guide (in English) you picked up in Amsterdam./ Why did I keep that? Where were we going? But she’s/ not there to answer
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