​Thinking of Gustav Klimt with Molly on My Lap

 
It is her favored cat’s position: kneading me
with her clawless pads, purring, her green
reptilian eyes studying white words on the PC screen,
waiting for her name to appear. Her pupils dilate.
Rain lashes against the window.
                                                                    A whirr of gold
in my mind; a woman emerging, as from a gold-leaf
quilt, extruded, bare-breasted, a metallic tapestry
what the world becomes behind her, the bursting of
body cells into their elements: auric arrangements
of eyes, silvery traces of an artisan’s fingers,
Molly pushing paws into my velour shirt, imprinting it,
licking the white border of her natural white ruff,
now crossing her white paws, suddenly quiescent,
 
                                               and Klimt’s The Kiss begins
to glow in a crowded room, where men and women
jostle politely, perfume mingled with nicotine,
eyes flashing,
                       where men and women fuse into a column
of weightless colors, the woman’s uplifted face leaning
into her left shoulder, his hands stroking her cheek,
her temple, tendrils coiled around her ankles, for she
is on her knees, where he is simply phallic, emerging
from a ground of broken glass,
                                                                 and Molly begins
kneading again, the rain at forty-five degrees
against the window, kitchen vents clanking in the wind,
 
                                               and it’s Klimt’s Salome holding 
John the Baptist’s head, her fingers supple as young bone,
his closed eyes like a man’s grown tired of reading,
no blood here, no redness, just her brownish nipples,
broken spirals, caught currents of air, her profile
ecstatic,
                   and Molly getting bored, looking at these words,
my hands clicking the space bar at the keyboard,
Molly turning in my lap, her paws on my chest, moving
rhythmically toward my throat, while she pushes into velour,
into the dry silence of a darkening room.
 

First published in The Quarterly

​

On the Blackness of Sidney


The first day he came to us, he was outside,
on the ledge, staring through the picture window,
burrs clinging to his haunches, patches of fur missing,
mad with hunger and dermatitis, fugitive from the woods,

accusing us, pressing his soundless cry against glass.
He ran off. Next day, we saw him beneath the blue spruce,
his body absorbed into the darkness of the ground,
eyes like lights risen from a depth. We knelt, and called,

saved him from a diet of crickets, removed swollen ticks,
black blood bursting over thumbnails, spoke to his
survivor’s nervousness, arguing a world safe, where love
growls in every tree, mercy squeals, the heart fails.

We saved him again as we returned from the beach,
the smell of sand and sea clinging to towels
and folding chairs. He came limping toward us, wincing
at our touch, panting like an old miner with black lung.

His bladder blocked. Those little stones
accreted from his ashy fears, anger’s alkali unfulfilled,
he would soon bloat like a child dying of hunger,
acting out the news of crop failures, helpless,

empathic. The vet removed his penis.
A urethra now wide, to pass the sediments of maleness,
made him no more female than Ethiopian marble
or the altered bulls of Pamplona. That didn’t matter.

What astonished was his reaction to the anesthetic:
his balding stomach; a grayish pink showing between
his incipient nipples. It was knowing he wasn’t ebony
to his bones. It was the soft feel of his baby skin,

the gradual, darkening fuzz of his body’s assumptions,
the way he pulled at his fur, combing it with his teeth,
incongruous white hairs like slivers of moon-fire
flickering in the space between his golden eyes.

First published in The Quarterly​