Lucille Medwick Memorial Award - 2003

I have been trying to understand
whether this life is what we burnish for the next.
Or will we be undone.
Last week a feral kitten found me, and now,

mottled with ringworm,
she moans in quarantine in my kitchen
and hugs a catnip mouse made of felt.
A scrawny, contagious cat in a kennel—

she could be my heart.
Which is to say: yowl, darkness, prison.
Which is to say: aria, nocturne, home.
Which is to say: pushing words around,

the in-box and the out.
I named the cat Simone de Beauvoir.
Is that the name of my heart?
I don't even like cats,

which she pretends not to know.
What does my heart pretend not to know?
Working at love
means abandoning the burnishing.

When I first saw her almost dead in the street,
I sat down and waited.
She circled me, coming closer,
until I was stupid and put out my hand.

The two of us in the middle of the street.
How could she think I know anything,
sitting in the middle of a street?
Now near the end of her sentence

she scratches the plastic kennel to get out.
What could she know?
Which is to say: need.
Which is to say: fear.

So many poems about the next life.
To make the poem itself a moral act.
Which is to say: heaven.
Which is to say: a larger room.