2002-2018
 
Caged in the shelter, you were Stoic’s tutor,
paws imperiously crossed, you’d look
away when approached with an air
of ‘I don’t care’ as family after family 
disappeared while you remained there.
 
Maybe it was the knowledge of the evening
in your eyes, or fur the color of wheat
in wind, or that white star on your forehead,
as if marked by the heavens for some great task,
or glory, a thing you could not win.
 
In any case, abandoned and abused 
we took you in, a foundling, you came back 
to love the world again, and whenever 
I was at the keyboard too long a time
you would brush by my chair, then sit and stare
 
up at me forever it seemed, and if ignored
you’d use your snout to bump my forearm
again and again until I could not type,
knowing it was time for something truly
important, the evening bowl, a romp, 
 
some attention.  None of this would change
your course, the one elemental direction
you seemed to be moving toward,
at sixteen you limped about the house
not hearing my call, but following me 
 
everywhere, pushing yourself along,
all senses dimmed, and I knew whatever
became of you became of Sappho, Homer
and Dante too, and you are now no less
than they, nor are they greater than you.
  
I imagine you should rest among 
your countrymen snug in their graves, the pets
of Powerscourt say, in County Wicklow,
dogs of the greenest fields, Molly and Shep,
better than a cenotaph in Père Lachaise 
 
with all its human sin, or that cedar box 
that now sits at the corner of my desk,
or your phantom nudge at the keyboard.
But you have joined another company, 
the unknown chronotope; I’ll be along presently.