“Family cleans house, finds pet tortoise missing since 1982”

What does a tortoise think? What does she feel?
She lives long and moves slow, heavy and protected.
Thirty years may pass like a sluggish dream.

We may rail against her long incarceration,
like Ricky Jackson’s, deserving of reparations —
but wonder: as a pet, was she not always captive?

Or we may cheer her escape, like Billy Hayes
fleeing on the midnight express from his thirty-year sentence —
although it seems she never scratched the door.

Or pity her stolen life, like Jaycee Dugard’s.
But, as Dugard found out, little by little,
the life you live becomes the real one.

Around her termites flashed, emissaries of light.
They live only a year or two. They feed on the trees
whose prana we block and hide in darkened rooms.
But nature always finds her way in.

In thirty years of encephalitic lethargy, Miss R*,
a patient of Oliver Sacks, thought of nothing.
“It’s dead easy, once you know how.”

Turning the corners of a cerebral quadrangle.
Silently repeating seven notes of a Verdi aria.
Drawing mental maps of maps of maps.

“My posture leads to itself,” she said. Perhaps Manuela too
curled endlessly inward, a shell in a shell. Perhaps
she too repeated for thirty years (in Tortoise):
“I am what I am what I am what I am…”

• Oliver Sacks, Awakenings (1973) p. 76.

Summer evening

Watermelon rind forgotten
in the grass for the ants.

Streetlights come on
and shadows move behind shaded windows.

Music from a car window
far away and going somewhere.

Spring is promise, but summer’s fullness
holds the seeds of its own dissolution.

Like dandelions that have turned
to ghosts and will soon fly away.

Like the drop hanging from the spigot, swelling
and just waiting to shatter.

Getty Images

Handwriting

 The left leg of my capital “N” sickles in,
 leaning against the right. The tail
 of the lower-case “y” deflates, 
 like a sad balloon. I blame myself.
  
 I remember a graphologist in France
 declared my handwriting “lacked confidence.”
 Olivetti removed me from their shortlist.
 My confidence deflated further.
  
 I remember an elementary teacher
 made me copy pages full of letters.
 At the top he’d put “D.O.” for “Do Over.”
 Over and over. Very occasionally,
 he’d put “O.K.” When my hand cramped up,
 he denounced the letters as “shaky.”
 All I took from fifth grade
 was my silent hatred of him.
  
 I remember an online poetry forum 
 where the overlords would command,
 “Read a thousand poems before you try
 to write another one.” Advice as worthless
 as Bart Simpson sentences on a blackboard.
  
 It’s a betrayal, and I think it is a sin:
 to take the vulnerable and the striving
 and deflate them just to show your power. 
  
 It’s like watching someone, waiting
 to catch them biting their nails,
 then calling them out: “Why do you still 
 bite them, when I am here to remind you?”
  
 I bite myself like an animal in a trap.
 It may take fifty years, but I will write
 “N.O.” at the top of the paper.
 I will fill my lungs and my letters with air.
 If you come to interfere, I will show you my teeth.
Image by Creative Market

Feline serenade

 Two o’clock. A muffled crooning
 Rises in the silent house.
 Through my door, a cat is singing,
 Mouth engorged with white toymouse.

 How is this a gift? I gave it.
 And I sure don’t want it now.
 She wants tuna. She’s created
 Tokens in exchange for chow.

 Or it's something darker? Blackmail?
 “Feed me now or else I'll bring
 Realmouse in here and release him.
 Then I’ll get to hear you sing!”

 Maybe that’s too harsh. She’s just
 A child who craves a midnight sweet.
 Maybe she has just invented
 Interspecies trick-or-treat.

 Truth is I have no idea
 What's inside that walnut skull.
 All the meat is hidden, so I
 Speculate about the hull.

 Humans, felines, all God’s creatures
 Croon to us through wooden doors.
 If we want to live together –
 Choose the kindest metaphors.
Photo by 123RF

Feeder action

 
 Flurries of sparrows come and go, 
 alarmed by things invisible to us.
 Bold chickadees do not budge for humans.
 Big and little woodpeckers, sated with insects,
 look for seeds to cleanse their palates.
 Nutty nuthatch eats upside down.
 Tufted titmouse, on the ground.
 Purple finch has no purple.
 Yellow finch looks like an escaped canary.
 The redbirds wait till the riffraff are gone,
 and dine at a civilized hour. 
                               All day long,
 squirrels squabble with the birds, 
 like children with their siblings.
  
 But at night the scene goes
 full mammal. The teenagers arrive.
 First the coons, the rockstars 
 who trash the place, shake
 the feeder down and break it open.
 Then the skunk who digs up the ground. 
 Having different diets, they coexist
 like separate high-school cliques. 
 Last of all Blossom
 the Possum, nature’s little hoover, 
 cleans it all up for the next morning,
 like the school janitor after the prom.
In flagrante delicto.