Footnote on broken things

 
My heart is too tender at times. I want to collect and hold all the broken things that I encounter. What can I fix in the broken world? What can I salvage? The latest pet is here beside me having gone blind in the last month, the cancer working its horror through her small body. She looks out toward the world no longer knowing what is there. She can see shadow from one small spot everything else she reads by whisker, scent and sound. Yesterday Ursula was tangled in the legs of nesting tables and panicked at the last moment to escape the beast and hit the wall, she sat shaken and lost while I gently spoke to her and pulled her close. This morning I followed her silently watching as she navigated back to the litter box. She halted twice as she neared the doorway but made her destination.

With the old cat, Comet, she lost her sight slowly over the years, probably at 18 or 19; she always saw shadow. Our gray guy, Kiki, lost most of his sight after an eye injury, one of his many nine plus lives moments that surprised us and our vet. It never seemed to slow Kiki down; Comet didn’t slow down either, except her normal I’m 100 in human years type of gearing down. Sunspot just fell ill and was gone, there was no linger and really little symptom. Jackson after many years of being obese, think tuxedoed barrel, got in shape, was the great hunter for years and then got skin cancer on his oh-so-pink nose. We did what we could working with Dr. Hullman, but we flailed and failed, not wanting to torture the old warrior.

We got Kiki and Jackson from a woman in Keno, we needed some outdoor cats to take care of mice and she needed someone who could give them more care. They became our terminator-bachelor-farmer cats, two of the sweetest cats I’ve ever met, but lethal to mice, squirrels, snakes, lizards, moles and a packrat (and an attempted meal of a jack rabbit). And birds, I’m sorry to add. Those two spent their days outside and at night I put them in the garage where they had beds that were warm and dry. Inside because there were too many night creatures looking for a nosh: coyotes, bobcats, owls and occasionally a cougar was in the area. I don’t think the eagles were too interested as there were so many other dining options.

I haven’t mentioned Phil, whose great body just gave out at age 17. Why do we keep on with these beasts? Bits of fur and sinew that to rule us, beasts we bow down to and coo, who’s a kitty, you’re a kitty, yes you are.

                            Equinox

And it is done. Snow this morning, Doak Mountain a promise.
A yellow finch topping the cup of snow on the monk pine
and the blind cat, Kiki, making his way across the lawn
as slow as a diver. The great bell of his head lifted,
he guides by sound and temperature, his body forever
taking him east, he crosses into the aspen grove, pauses to pat
a rock, walks across three more and then finds the large volcanic
slab, snowless, out of the wind. There he sits, gazing
at the world which is now shadow; how much depth or light
I can only guess. Face into the sun, eyes slits, birds
slowly forgetting he is not stone.