Year of the Goat by Ray Holmes

Year of the Goat
It doesn’t matter,
the tin foil thunder
rattling house and body,

shaking us rung by rung clear
out of our separate storms.

You are one thing
at the doorway,
another once fully entered,

boarded as the windows
we shy away from.

And me? I am battered
and bashing at the threshold,
newly antlered, my head

wired with bone and
the seeds of a flame

we thought hushed
when those gray winds boiled
over the edge of town.

The new year has risen.
Let’s forgive ourselves

the old ways of caring,
the bodily zodiac
of tacit glances,

breaths marking the skin
like steam burns.

Hands in their
separate wringings.
However the gray

ribbon of fortune falls,
however the days

crumple into dusk,
there will still be
shelter and arms

and the cool crust
of the earth below

as we lay and name
each dart of lightning
that slips into the house
like the stray cat it is.

About the Poet
Ray Holmes is a graduate of the MFA program at University of MO-St. Louis. He teaches writing in St. Louis, where he lives with his wife and two cats.  His work has appeared in Architrave Press, Chariton Review, Dialogist, Midwestern Gothic, Nat. Brut, Thin Air, and other journals.