Cat's Jaw

With your shorn beard there went youth

your face smooth and drooped as a sun-tongued pear.

My hair, measured in feet rather than inches

should be next, even before cancer, that crazed cretin

gulping the family like gumdrops...before cancer,

like some bald (if un-charming) star-captain “make(s) it so.”

Dilemma plagues us: to grow older together, or alone?

Things crumble to dust the minute we touch them

Motes mate wearily in sunbeams licking the worn floor.

No Midases, we.

Yesterday, the cat trapped a fledgling in his jaws

I leapt; a tiger! tapping furiously at canned fish, as though

fish were less worthy than bird.

But in he came, and the finch flew free, to where, I couldn't tell

The sun too bright, the old eyes too bleary. 

You've often said, “what we fear most are not the things that happen.”

You were right -- again. Not that anyone's keeping score.

Not that either of us could make out the marks on the card.

Not that the bird won't survive another swipe at our yard.

copyright 2008 Julianza Shavin