Cat Poem

CAT POEM

The cat’s hardly moving; she’s stopped eating, stopped shitting, she puts her face to a bowl of water

but doesn’t drink. My friend says not to write about her, he says no one wants to read about my pet

so let’s say it’s your cat, not mine, or maybe you have a dog; even I, a cat owner, think that dogs

are superior, they have such compassionate eyes. Once, an actor—not just any actor, but Al Pacino—

did an entire stage performance keeping in mind the liquid brown eyes of someone

in the audience, playing to those eyes, and when the house lights went up he realized

it was a guide dog, a German Shepherd, so maybe if you imagine your dog or even better

Al Pacino’s dog, hardly moving, its ribs heaving, that would be preferable, but if you don’t

like dogs maybe a bird will do, or whales, people seem to care about the whales, lying on their great sides

on the beach, or the seals with their skulls crushed by clubs—think of them, their orphaned pups—

or just forget about the animals entirely; forget the beagles smoking while they run on treadmills

and those rabbits the cosmetic companies seem to favor, though it’s harder to discount

the chimpanzees injected with simian AIDS, unless maybe the retrovirus inhabiting your friend

has just become immune to the protease inhibitors, so forget the chimpanzees, too,

remember my cat? She’s lying on the bathroom rug, her organs shutting down—imagine I wept

all day for her—Vanilla is her name, my daughter named her at five, now my daughter’s grown,

now the cat’s old, I’ve put her on the bed and I’m talking to her, saying It’s all right,

go if you need to, and I’m watching death—he’s stroking her fur, making his rounds,

he’s talking to her softly, telling her to stop, ignoring me for now, ignoring you.

Noir

NOIR

Everybody dies, Bob Roberts, the crooked fight promoter,

tells Charlie Davis early in Body and Soul,

and it’s the line Charlie throws back at him

like a perfect counterpunch at the close of the film.

The fix was in—go the distance and lose the decision—

but Charlie refused to take a dive,

thereby losing sixty grand but regaining his soul

and his long-suffering true love. What’re you gonna do,

kill me? Everybody dies, Charlie says, and he

and his true love go laughing into the final frame.

In the alternate ending, written but never shot,

Charlie’s killed and stuffed into a trashcan. What difference

if the audience leaves the theater believing

Charlie’s still out there somewhere,

working a cash register like his mother