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.

That streetlight looks like the slicked backbone

            of a dead tree in the rain, its green lamp blazing

like the first neon fig glowing in the first garden

            on a continent that split away from Africa

from which floated away Brazil. Why are we not

            more amazed by the constellations, all those flung

stars held together by the thinnest filaments

            of our evolved, image making brains. For instance,

here we are in the middle of another Autumn,

            plummeting through a universe that made us

from its shattering and dust, stooping

            now to pluck an orange leaf from the sidewalk,

a small veined hand we hold in an open palm

            as we walk through the park on a weekend we

invented so we would have time to spare. Time,

            another idea we devised so the days would have

an epilogue, precise, unwavering, a pendulum

            strung above our heads.  When was the sun

enough? The moon with its diminishing face?

            The sea with its nets of fish? The meadow’s

yellow baskets of grain? If I was in charge

            I’d say leave them there on their backs

in the grass, wondering, eating berries

            and rolling toward each other’s naked bodies

for warmth, for something we’ve yet to name,

            when the leaves were turning colors in their dying

and we didn’t know why, or that they would return,

            bud and green. One of a billion

small miracles. This planet will again be stone.