On his last walk his shadow
Walks dutifully behind him
In a store window his reflection
Says farewell. Things he knew
Alone in all the world
Prepare to disperse and become
As if they'd never been. On behalf
Of all things living a cat
Allows itself to speak to him
Without irony or condescension.
If God is feeling
Particularly probable
He conjures himself
Into being. The moon
Has seen this often.
Tonight she mutters
That the universe
Was much better
In the old days
Before quantum physics.
My reflection claims
He used to be an agent
Of a police so secret
Even he didn't know
Who they were.
His favorite partner
Was a retired seraph
Who'd gambled away
Three of her six wings.
My shadow's grown ragged.
Ashamed to be seen,
She urges me to go abroad
Only on moonless nights.
My name ages rapidly.
Childishly, it keeps picking up
Stray letters in the street
And sticking them anywhere.
Because of this it's become
Unpronounceable; people
Wishing my attention
Are obliged to flick my ears
Or throw things at me.
If you asked Turner the painter
How many cats he owned he
Would turn slightly away from you
And gesture at his ear with
A loaded paintbrush (he could
Summon a brush by thinking of it)
And shrug, feigning deafness.
If you persisted he might pause
As if in deep thought before saying
"Many." In his great painting "Venice
From the Porch of Madonna della Salute"
You will sometimes see a calm grey cat
On the center-rightside gondola.
A word flies by
Girandole, say, or gasogene,
I bid it stay while I
Construct a poem;
It will have none of it.
More evidence that I
Am not Li Po;
Words always obeyed him!
Unhappy with being assigned
To an abandoned building
In Beijing, my great-grandfather
Juda (his name once had an "h;"
He bartered it away for
Magic beans which grew overnight
But led only to the floating castle
Of a giant so impoverished that Juda
Lent him two dollars and a half)
Searches for new places to haunt.
The store he rented in 1912
Was torn down to widen the entrance
To the Holland Tunnel. Drivers,
Seeing him approach, rolled their windows
Lest he squeegee them. Graph paper,
Toy cars, rose bushes and old issues
Of The Forward all proved unsatisfactory.
For now, he's haunting a silver teapot
His daughter Jenny gave my mother
But this cannot last; the teapot
Houses too many ghosts already.
There is or was or will be a river
In China or Guinea-Bissau or Ohio;
Those heavy with grief
Travel or have travelled or
Will travel to its banks relying
On its promise to ignore them.
