The cat on the lap, still

You’re not the first pet or person 
who’s died under my watch, Sammy D,
but you’re the first one who never left.
Two weeks after they put you to sleep 
forever, you’re nestling in my empty lap,
and I’m knuckling the short hairs 
that no longer exist above your nose
and it is your eyes that still glow
in this artifice of dusk. 
Your creamy white moonlight love
still bathes the world, it’s everywhere,
beyond the couch and chair and beds
where I cradled you,
beyond this apartment, this city, 
beyond form or emptiness.

This isn’t “denial”
or any other stage of grief. 
You remain.
The same neurons and synapses 
that crackled in my brain and created
and shaped you before your demise
are still crackling, emitting the same sparks,
the same messages.

Sammy, I never explained to you
because you were and still are a cat
that I admire the wise Buddhists
who’ve codified the different 
categories of illusion,
which I’m supposed to pierce and shred
in order to competely and utterly
wake up.
Once I do that, they tell me,
since I’m in the human realm
I should still go about my business
and do my best to live 
in the present tense and stave off
suffering, as if the apparitions of car alarms, 
blueberries, Red Sox games and cats 
flashing and vanishing 
in my very small mind are real. 


But now I can feel you scrunched
on my thighs so why are you
any less real than everything else
that isn’t real?

First there is a Sammy, 
then there is no Sammy
then there is.
Let’s keep this up, 
you and me,
let’s not stop
reinventing love.

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