OVEN SPRING
I’m palming tough dough in the wide sunny kitchen,
pushing a lingering dream into the ball of wheat and seed:
a virgin and a witch, lavender and tar. The rest, dark lake.
Now my age is showing, all the years landing at once. Sudden
etchings around my eyes and mouth, just like my father’s. Now
are the days of tuna, of milk, until my old cat refuses even this.
I look out the window, its imperfect antique glass
warping the grass into foam and roil of ocean,
and don’t see her skinny black on the lawn
and go looking. She’s in the murk under the porch, flies gathered
at her eyelids, her jagged hips lightly slunk into soil and leaf.
She comes to my call, slow, ricketing, shoulder blades sharp
under sunken skin, left ear nicked from some youthful rumble.
She sinks her needle claws into the pale meat of my arm—
is mad, mad I’ve saved her from her animal death.
Still, she sleeps in my armpit in the too-big bed.
Still, she searches my face with her bronze-flecked eyes,
a little vacant, and purrs, and purrs, and purrs.
Now the dog knows she’s gone, but doesn’t care
the way I want him to. Her tiny body, reduced to ash, fits
in the smallest urn. Fits in my palm. I dream again and again
of the dark lake, old cat in my childhood canoe, fish
flapping their last gasps against the shining grain. Sweet
poison, waking to the cold shadow of nothing
nestled to my side. Mornings, I knead and braid wisps of dream
into the bread: a prince and an albatross, wormwood and rust. The rest,
forest fog. The oven’s waves pink the scars where once she gripped me.
Published by North American Review, 307.1, Spring 2022.
