Caressment

Calico cat shrieking in the snowfall of mid-April so far north the body screams for release into its original skin south of here, but . . . I walk not well, though I walk, I eat not well, though I eat, I sleep not well, though I sleep, and the creatures surrounding the first person singular are each one my beloved that I caress so much I invent the title of this and care nothing for its origin save that it lives, as do all other loves in my life, past, present, and future, though some have gone, true, and some will never arrive now. The calico cat is shrieking because a kitten is being made in the snow. A red-wing blackbird chucks or maybe clucks, and dives. Two mourning doves sound like wood chipping when they fly. Cathleen sleeps. The nine cats sleep. I sleep on my feet, when I sleep. I am an aging man waking before growing too old to confess:

All I did I did to justify my existence and maybe along the way, some one of yours. There being in the lives of those I love too many lives to hold in mind, and may I say, dear reader, that was my intention when I was young no less than now, when seventy-two years gone by I look to see the seventy-third pass away and stop the fool in me from dying, he was always so fond of folly and the desire to abandon the old road for the one he did not know with the promise that a new city, a new land, a new language is all in the sound of words and not their meaning, no, where the hand goes the lips go and where the hand and lips go the body follows and there have been so many discoveries I cannot see them all at the same time, I am that blind.

(16, 21 August 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander