There is a Hole in Internet Explorer Today

This is something I wrote last week at work, inspired by an email my boss sent around about the "IE7 security hole." This also came from the sudden death of my cat, who had fully recovered from his paralysis yet passed quickly and in that sense gracefully at home. (Note: I have replaced the original poem that was below with the revision as of July '10.)

There is a Hole in Internet Explorer Today

 

and you can’t see outer space through it,
the dark energy and dark matter that fight
inside our lives. I walk past the teardrop-shaped
colored lights on North Tioga Street             

 

in front of a dentist’s office, identical
to the ones my grandfather used to drape
over the snowy azalea bushes out front
that flamed pink and purple every summer

 

of childhood. He has been gone
15 years, which is a long time in cat
years, and I find myself in the middle
of something I can’t explain, about how love

 

loses itself though it never means to.
The acupuncturist yesterday stuck needles in
my elbows, and I wondered when I’d stop
being a pincushion—apparently not

 

yet—and I tried not to cry into
the face cradle, because I’ve never even made
successful graffiti,
like the stuff in the stalls at the DeWitt Mall

 

(someone announcing her marriage
in marker, someone else writing classy).
So when grapefruit-sized hail falls,
when you remember the Stations of the Cross

 

painted on the walls inside your childhood
church, when you cry to Our Lady
of Catheters, of Credit Card Debt,
I think you should stop for a minute

 

and admire something.