Instinct
No matter, nothing could help me make sense
of what it’s like to watch a man fall to his knees then crawl the gutter. I listen
from my bedroom window—metal bottom scraping the asphalt. Half-asleep,
I wake fully to spot an old steamer trunk making noises. . . that trunk
being positioned by the open backdoor of his car, to wait at curbside for more
human complicity. Enough here to make me choke with impending. More
to come—the cat whipping his tail, growling on the windowsill. Controlled
by instinct, he is. And since there are no gods at 4 a.m. within city-limits,
there’s nothing to help us where I live at a dead-end, surrounded by trees.
My do-it-this-way-world is collapsing without precedent. I could assume
this sort of thing has gone on forever. Or maybe everything’s always only
half-over. It takes time to let this man in and out of my head. He’s the one
with his arms stretching hard to pull something weighty from the backseat
then stuff it down in the trunk by the curb. That must have been the point when
I awoke fully to see him on all fours crawling the gutter under the street light.
The order keeps shifting and the details. Time in the dark
until it’s one big indelible jump back to me and the cat at the beginning. My
bedroom window. That’s my cat and me, alright. Separate and apart
but for explosive combinations of this in the future.
