Waiting for a deceased friend’s cat to die
is almost unbearable. “This is where you live now,”
I explain. “Please stop crying.” But he is like a widower
in some kind of holding pattern around a difficult truth.
His head, his bearing, his movements are handsome to me,
a kind of permanent elsewhere devoted to separation and death.
“Please, let’s try to forget, dear. We need each other.”
I feel I want to tell him something, but I don’t know what.
So much that happens doesn’t make sense. Each night,
I do the corpse pose, and he ponders me, with his corpse face,
while licking his coat. The Egyptians first tamed his kind.
Their dead were buried in galleries closed up with stone slabs.
When my friend and I were young,
we tramped through woods of black oaks.
- Henri Cole