Then, to my safe dull world, they came,
weird birds my wife wanted to tame,
legions of spikes and spines and quills
roosting on tables, crowding sills,
maces and morning stars that she
rifled from nature’s armory,
half-sprung grenades and razor gauze
filling the gaps where softness was.

Brought home from nurseries, shipped by mail,
two inchlings culled from roadside shale
illegally, three filling shelves
with inbred cuttings of themselves,
crude cousins in a hunchbacked bloom
colluding across the living room.
Here dragon eggs, there devil’s phlegm,
a barb-encrusted diadem

of torturous gold, tantrums of green:
why are they here? What do they mean?
She dotes and fawns, but can’t appease
their anti-social tendencies,
and so a dust of spidery hairs
(despite the doubled gloves she wears)
will keep her scratching where they kissed
a bared knuckle or exposed wrist.

If nature doesn’t make mistakes,
then what are these? And yet she makes
more space for them, until our mild
safe house has grown carefully wild
with ragged stalks and snarling ropes.
She’s right. Somehow these misanthropes,
these gargoyles, barbed and hairy,
sharpen the need for sanctuary,

and are proof that paradise
is fenced by ugliness and vice.
Even perfection needs its flaws,
the thrill of risk, the threat of claws.
Why be so picky with my praise?
Turning the lamps off, she surveys
a world of troll, pagan, and infidel
grinning in moonlight. All is well.