What Animals Are Admitted To Paradise

Mountain goats have climbed their way hoof and tail apart to the tallest
peaks and leaped with lockets of an old man’s beard. They say the
goats that make the leap and survive, the ones that make it

across to land on the other cliff, get their shadows turned into clouds.
The other goats who fall, we honor their sacrifice and paint their horns gold.
Kelp is now used to stitch back together the burnt skin of beloveds

left in a burning building. The kelp keeps moisture in, the salt cleans
The wound. The big question is will
The kelp skin cause the hand to smell of barnacle?

Yes, the graft will make the beloved crave seafood and salt.
They will also develop a new ability to swim in boiling water.
We keep the keepers, those glorious goats

Self-sacrificed in the color of blue, in the origin of pottery.
The birds do not fly in the night clouds, fearing
Their wings to be clipped and left bleeding. They

Say these white wisps were made of the pubic
Hair of virgins on the marriage bed. The hair braided
And bleached light from urine. We see gold where we want to.

A black cat gets stuck in the jaws of a slumbering bull.
The bull has no appetite for fur, but the cat remains there
Playing dead, his pink tongue peeking past canines.

Later he loses a leg and his skin grows green, craves sardines.
What is poetry? It is the mountain goats scream as it leaps
Its way from one side of a cliff to the other. It is the moment

In the scream where he realizes he has miscalculated, that
His hooves won’t make it. Poetry is the sound the scream makes
As it descended through the canon, the very moment before

the skull crashes against stone and turned to gold.
How many more acres of fig trees must burn to wake
the dead with gold horns into spring.