When Milo was a kitten 

and spent the night

with us in the big bed,

curled like a brown sock

at our feet, he would

wake before daybreak,

squeak plaintively 

in his best Burmese,

cat-castrato soprano,

and make bread on our stomachs

until if one of us did not rise,

sleep-walk to the kitchen

and open his can of food,

he would steal under the covers,

crouch, run hard at us,

jam his head

in our armpits,

and burrow fiercely.

Probably he meant nothing by that.

Or he meant it in cat-contrary,

just as he did not intend

drawing blood the day

he bolted out the door

and was wild again

for nearly three hours.

I could not catch him

until I knelt, wormed

into the crawl-space

under a neighbor house

and lured him home

with bits of dried fish.

Or he meant exactly what he smelled,

and smelled the future

as it transmogrified out of the past,

for he is, if not an olfactory

clairvoyant,

a highly nuanced cat—

an undoer of complicated knots,

who tricks cabinets,

who lives to upend tall

glasses of Merlot.

With his whole body,

he has censored the finest passages of Moby-Dick.

He has silenced Beethoven with one paw.

He has leapt three and a half feet

from the table by the wall

and pulled down

your favorite print by Miró.

He does not know the word no.

When you asked the vet what 

kind of cat it was, she went

into the next room

came back and said,

“Havana Brown.”

The yellow eyes, the voice,

the live spirit that plays into dead seriousness

and will not be punished into goodness,

but no—

an ancient, nameless breed—

mink he says and I answer in cat.

Even if I was not

born in a dumpster 

between a moldy cabbage

and an expired loaf of bread,

I too was rescued by an extravagant woman.

unveil themselves in dark.
They hang, each a jagged,

silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright
as polished knives. They swim

the muddled air and keen
like supersonic babies, the sound

we imagine empty wombs might make
in women who can’t fill them up.

A clasp, a scratch, a sigh.
They drink fruit dry.

And wheel, against feverish light flung hard
upon their faces,

in circles that nauseate.
Imagine one at breast or neck,

Patterning a name in driblets of iodine
that spatter your skin stars.

They flutter, shake like mystics.
They materialize. Revelatory

as a stranger’s underthings found tossed
upon the marital bed, you tremble

even at the thought. Asleep,
you tear your fingers

and search the sheets all night.

My two hunting dogs have names, but I rarely use them. As 

I go, they go: I lead; they follow, the blue-eyed one first, then

the one whose coloring—her coat, not her eyes—I sometimes 

call never-again-o-never-this-way-henceforth. Hope, ambition: 

these are not their names, though the way they run might suggest 

otherwise. Like steam off night-soaked wooden fencing when 

the sun first hits it, they rise each morning at my command. Late 

in the Iliad, Priam the king of Troy predicts his own murder—

correctly, except it won’t be by spear, as he imagines, but by 

sword thrust. He can see his corpse, sees the dogs he’s fed and 

trained so patiently pulling the corpse apart. After that, he says,

When they’re full, they’ll lie in the doorway, they’ll lap my blood. 

I say: Why shouldn’t they? Everywhere, the same people who 

mistake obedience for loyalty think somehow loyalty weighs more 

than hunger, when it doesn’t. At night, when it’s time for bed, 

we sleep together, the three of us: muscled animal, muscled animal, 

muscled animal. The dogs settle to either side of me as if each 

were the slightly folded wing of a beast from fable, part power, part 

recognition. We breathe in a loose kind of unison. Our breathing 

ripples the way oblivion does—routinely, across history’s face.

When I come home they rush to me, the flies, & would take me, they would take me in their small arms if I were smaller, so fly this way, that way in joy, they welcome me. They kiss my face one two, they say, Come in, come in. Sit at this table. Sit. They hold one hand inside the other & say, Eat. They share the food, sit close to me, sit. As I chew they touch my hair, they touch their hands to my crumbs, joining me. The rim of my cup on which they perch. The milky lake above which. They ask for a story: How does it begin? Before, I was a child, & so on. My story goes on too long. I only want to look into their faces. The old one sits still, I sit with it, but the others busy themselves now with work & after the hour which maybe to them is a week, a month, I sleep in the room between the open window & the kitchen, dreaming though I were the Sierra, though I were their long lost sister, they understand that when I wake I will have to go. One helps me with my coat, another rides my shoulder to the train. Come with me, come, I say. No, no, it says, & waits with me there the rest whistling, touching my hair, though maybe these are its last seconds on earth in the light in the air is this love, though it is little, my errand, & for so little I left my house again.