As a ribcage accepts      the sunlight dripping
             through it, my cat staggers

into the room. He can         no longer wash his eyes
             with his shell-pink tongue & drools

continuously into his gleaming fur.
             His silver such       that whole photo albums

exist dedicated to its luster. My mother told me
              to write happily, to be        happily writing. Sontag

assures me illness       is the night-side of life.
             I lift my cat to my bed & we face the wall.

Cupping against & warming my body
             is his body. Parenthesis inside parenthesis.

–

At the conference, the poets speak of apocalypse
             & night-blooming jasmine.          The writer

who groped me years ago sidles across the room
             with his wet mouth.          I try to ignore his growth

of shadow & write about my cat          in the splintered white
             of my conference brochure. I draw

a circle. The circle represents how two nights ago
             my cat tried to escape       the needle wishing

to end him, then turned his head         suddenly breathing
             against my stomach & died there. My circle

is not small enough. I watch the writer
             out of the corner of my eye.      I draw a smaller

circle. It is not        small enough.

–

Pet euthanasia consists typically of pentobarbital,
             but nobody knows           why the good poison

is called pentobarbital. My dictionary tells me
             it’s named for a woman        perhaps or green moss

or a lute. I imagine the woman’s ocean-
             wide arms encircling           his small cat body,

the lute’s liquid           protection spell, the moss
             & its legend of green decay.

–

I am told I do not correctly
             tune my poems         to my readers; they wander

amid the mouths           & moss & sweet
             dead cats. I am told death is a subject

best left oblique, a bone         with the meat still
             resting. And yet I worked for years

in an animal clinic with pentobarbital
             buzzing beneath          the floortile & inside

the walls.         How can I tell my readers
             how my cat, like my dead mother,

is outside my language, my home no longer
             a land he steps into, except         here he is,

traveling this poem. A fact only because
             I protect him         with the needle’s gentler

ending, drawing        my circle around us
             both, reciting our story back to myself,

my words curling         around his name.