Summary

In “Cathedral Kitsch” the speaker of the poem wonders about God, whether he loves gold, or does he “shine back/at Himself from walls/like these” (15). In the vague setting of the cathedral, the speaker says “I feel/man here. The same wish/that named the planets … with his shoes and tools,/his insistence to prove we exist/just like God” (15). The poem ends with the speaker listening to the brass pipes of the cathedral, and “the chorus of crushed cans/someone drags over cobbles/in the secular street” (15).

“At Some Point, They’ll Want to Know What It Was Like” is a short poem that describes an ambiguous event marked by “the during,” with its “rough churn of bulk and breath, limb and tooth,” and “the before,” marked by “waiting, knowing … Pang. Pleasure then pain” (16). The speaker then describes a time during...