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The Cats Miss Him Too This is the cat who lurks on the lip of the tub when we bathe. Purrs, paces, scoops water on an orange paw she licks and dips again. As if to lap the dreadful wetness dry. At night she wanders up and down the stairs, moans muffled by the sock she carries in her mouth, ours fished from the laundry hamper, our son's from the darkness under his bed. The other cat stays out all night all summer, brings home scars or skulls of mice or limp bedraggled birds. We belled her but she scraped the collar off. Now she leaps on top of the bookshelf, hovers there for hours. They both want in, want out, want in, want out again. They test thedepth of snow, splay one foot after another. The cats are moon-walking, our son would say, nose pressed to window glass. Imprinted on fresh snow their claw-toed tracks. Now that he's left home, they curl on his bed, one at the foot, one at the head. The bed so rarely slept in we rarely change the sheets, the duvet dusted with their hair like down. Not that he's gone forever or for long. We come, separately, to sit at his empty desk. The clothes he didn't want folded in shut drawers, the closet closed. The books he didn't take this time. Fantasies. Sci fi. Romances of the mind. He hurtles through landscapes we can barely imagine, that we have no place in. As if he were walking on the moon. That far from us: exploring Venus, mapping Mars. © Betsy Struthers, |
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