Charlie

Charlie

He was the largest of the cats, robust,

muscular and commanding.

If human he’d be haughty.

Toward me, he was always indifferent, maybe wary;

most likely I was simply invisible.

My affection never registered,

but he had my respect.

In his youth, infection put him in a plastic cone,

and left him with a crumpled ear.

He was annoyed, not humiliated, mostly stoic.

When, seeking safety, we enclosed the back yard,

he barely acknowledged the cat-proof fence,

and climbed to freedom over the garage roof.

I barely recognized him in the illness that brought him down.

Shrunken, on spindle legs like a cat on a cartoon broomstick.

For his medicine, my wife and I bound him in a towel.

Tightly held, he struggled;

only my effort held him.

The final time, with superfeline strength he fought free,

jumped to the floor,

and ran beneath the table.

My wife stooped and looked.

“He died,” she said.

Not, “He’s dead,” but as though reporting already fixed fact,

not the abrupt ending that severed time.

He lay under the table, eyes wild, heart stopped, jaw gaping, legs outstretched.

Not curled but defiant,

frozen in flight.

Free at last.

My first thought: he died trying to escape me,

always unrequited, now to blame.

A grief larger than he was,

sharpened by knowing it would not last:

he was only a cat.

I hope now for the day when he

who remembers a fallen sparrow,

the one for whom nothing is lost,

will reach deep into the past,

past all my forgetting,

and retrieve this small worthy life.