"All This and More," Devil Poem by Mary Karr

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Poem of the Day: All This and More BY MARY KARR The Devil's tour of hell did not include    a factory line where molten lead    spilled into mouths held wide, no electric drill spiraling screws into hands and feet, nor giant pliers    to lower you into simmering vats. Instead, a circle of light opened on your stuffed armchair, whose chintz orchids did not boil and change, and the Devil adjusted    your new spiked antennae almost delicately, with claws curled and lacquered black, before he spread    his leather wings to leap    into the acid-green sky. So your head became a tv hull, a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger    sloppy at the mouth and swollen at the joints    enacted your days in sinuous    slow motion, your lines delivered with a mocking sneer. Sometimes    the frame froze, reversed, began    again: the red eyes of a friend you cursed, your girl child cowered    behind the drapes, parents alive again    and puzzled by this new form. That's why you clawed your way back to this life. Mary Karr, "All This and More" from The Devil's Tour. Copyright © 1993 by Mary Karr. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Source: The Devil's Tour (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993) MARY KARR Biography  More poems by this author

Relax Into Death,Sinner's Welcome,MaryKarr Poem

For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature

by Mary Karr
I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor's pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns

to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I'm not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel

how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail

did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch

that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw

is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,

let me learn from this animal's deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.
"For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature" by Mary Karr, from Sinner's Welcome. © Harper Collins, 2006. Reprinted with permission.