A Man and His Cat

“Ireland would be a grand place to be dead,” I say,

just thinking about it.  That’s all.

Am I mulling a past wrong or a deluded moment, or a melancholy?

And as I pour some time into quiet, the guards announce him,

like a ghost that sprawls the battlements.

“There is such a comraderie in the graveyards;

all of the McCorkles and the O’Gradys munched together

beneath the lush emerald sod.

Everyone looking as if they belonged:

eccentrics, alcoholics, and the village lout.

Some children, of course, taken by the typhus or diptheria;

wives, young or old; husbands, good and bad.

They all looked so chummy in the earth.”

Sometimes Sammie and I both just stare,

as if in face paint and Hamlet

– as if before an emptied platter –

watching the grease and gravy of civilization harden slowly.

Just as a poet will reminisce by a still metaphor,

judging the beauty of its fit, feel its radiating power…

just as Hamlet was mesmerized by dark, brutal Denmark…

Sammie dissolves into the depths of my lap

like a lump of sugar will dissolve itself in tea.

And as I stir the soup of silent reflection,

Sammie and I spend an inordinate amount of time simmering.

Sammie and I are hard at work prepping a kind of stock

where Sammie is a clear broth,

while I am more like a lump in gravy.

                                         – by Carl Nelson

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