Tag Archives: pets
My cat in heaven
Not apprehending time, my old cat says she will live forever. I tell her that in the last years — — of forever, which she does not apprehend — she will need other humans, that I will have gone ahead to answer to God, right after I plug in the heated bed, prepare her favorite […]
My friend’s dog
Even when I am unworthy of praise, my friend’s dog greets me as if I made the world, and it is wholly good. He wonders what delight I will next create, what miracle I might yet perform. He can scarcely contain his joy at my possibility; he wriggles with my irrefutable goodness. And I had […]
Digging the hen’s grave
on a day when I can, though barely, my own mortality implicated, excavated, spading through hardpan, carving space for the body she still inhabits, tail down, but head up. Eyes bright; a shimmer of hackle feathers she will not molt. Secretly, I invoke fox, bobcat, hawk: You may come now; she can no longer run. […]
Witnessing
Life leaves those you love at its own pace, in its own way: the brief violence of injury, the cataclysmic failure of brain or heart. Both to be preferred, you think now, to the implacable tick of illness, rogue cells propagating, occupying a vanishing vitality. After a time, you wish to find him dead, gone […]
Crush
I have developed a crush on my veterinarian, the most useful romance I will never have. Still, I learn her language: I speak inflammatory bowel disease, chronic pancreatitis, allergic sensitivity, idiopathic origins, unpredictable progressions. This one will end where it starts, will leave me doting on the old cat purring in my lap as I […]
From my cat, I catch contentment
Some strange grace arises from the hand buried in the soft fur of my cat’s purring belly and spreads up my arm to the rotator cuff again torn and mending poorly, through the hollow of my chest wherein beats raggedly the perplexed heart, down the depthless region of fulfilled and disappointed desire, into the […]
Her perfection
Today I made my cat bloom, the small pink petal of her tongue emerging from the soft sepals of her mysterious mouth. Thereby she declared me sun, though my sole virtue is a lap, and not always that. Her virtues are many; let me name equanimity, how patiently she abides my eclipses, my settings. […]
When it breaks
When it breaks, may it break well for you. When grief stills your tongue, may it be consoled by a Hostess Ho Ho, a pale ale, a dry red or dark roast. By anything that comforts, may your silent tongue be comforted. When it breaks, may it break well for you. May your surviving […]
Witnessing
Life leaves those you love at its own pace, in its own way: the brief violence of injury, the cataclysmic failure of brain or heart. Both to be preferred, you think now, to the implacable tick of illness, rogue cells propagating, occupying a vanishing vitality. After a time, you wish to find him dead, gone […]
Meditatio Ephemera 