“Rosemary Lamb” by Kenny Williams

Kenny Williams

ROSEMARY LAMB

The heaven of the gods that are not God

is never big enough. It’s always filling up

with smoke, the greasy breath

of sacrifice, which gods alone can take as food.

Our Father gave this business up

to stink up our bright booths

of plush and gold. The server serves

the slaughtered lamb, the lungs

the expanding sky. I sing while I can.

The palace of the gods is always adding on.

And if you glut yourself on smoke

you’ll live forever and forever

is an end to the story of the gods,

the start of all that’s come before,

sheer prolog to the puff.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Kenny Williams: “I’m an animal by nature, an animal-eater by design, a pagan by sensibility, and a Catholic by conversion. The phrase ‘of faith’ seems to me highly problematic. Like the word ‘Christian’ nowadays, it could mean anything or nothing. To call yourself a ‘poet of faith’ is a dangerous move, something like calling yourself a saint or a genius, but since I’m playing by the rules, and since I take the Catholic dogmata as my model of reality, and since I take the unfashionable view that art is a useful tool by which the audience (that brilliant goofball) may deepen its appreciation of the predicament of being human within the all-demanding context of objective truth, i.e. reality, I call myself, quite possibly in error, a poet of faith.”