I Am Trying to Love the Whole World
but you can’t keep everything.
You can only enter the sleepless
rooms repeating, more slowly
& in alphabetical order
the names of birds: albatross bunting cormorant dove. Albatross
bunting cormorant
instead of your dead friends
don’t you mean?
Mean egret. Mean grackle. Mean humming.
Keep humming. Keep jay.
Say kingfisher. Say loon.
Say despite the racoons screeching
all night like blown timing belts
high in the trash trees
while the skeletal fence cats carry on
their cage match over moonlight.
Say Katie Rhonda Shimi T I mean
mocking mocking
& still we haven’t finished
cleaning out your studio, your drawers
full of heart-shaped catalpa leaves
sketches of standing ovations
for melancholic rock stars, charm
bracelets & the chiseled gray
mountains of Spain, over which
we had yet to fly.
& your laugh like an ambulance,
& your laugh like the elephant grass.
Jenny Browne
Jenny Browne is the author of four collections: Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (2019), Dear Stranger (2014), The Second Reason (2007), and At Once (2003). She earned her MFA from the James Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. She served concurrent terms as City of San Antonio Poet Laureate (2016-18) and Poet Laureate of the State of Texas (2018) and in 2020 was Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. Browne teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio
