Elusive, mischievous feline, you confound me,

you are stardust, quicksilver,

a pink-nosed rogue, indifferent to beseeching,  

oblivious to the outstretched palm,

and as I lean near to listen with all attentiveness,

you withhold even the momentary purr,

choosing only a quizzical look and a single blink

before the paw lick and scamper,

and the search to grace elsewhere.

A patient heart never tires,
as it sees all is yet possible,
dare believes all eternally imminent,
as it skillfully contorts the truth,
happily feeding the delusion
until the heart finally beats irregularly,
straining from ages of neglect,
famished from the absence of reciprocity,
the denial unearthed,
rendering the muscle damaged,
no longer capable of the largesse
which had long infused hope,
the brittle harmony broken, leaving
only the memory of what might have been.

The chill breeze, long awaited, finds its whisper
in the tall grasses,
tilting the hydrangeas, full and round, pink and purple
as the hewn lawn, more fragrant as dusk nears,
cushions the fawn,
the newborn to again perch precariously
atop unsteady spindles,
to weave through his mother’s legs as she pokes,
then slides through the brush.
And as I raise my brow over the hammock's edge,
the squirrels hunch and chew and hop in unison
as they laugh quietly, my idleness risible,
before a third and final turn of the paragraph
renders me drowsy, the tome now abreast my breast
as a lazy arm falls without the swaying catch in surrender.

Days once lived in anticipation, anxious for love,
yet ever hopeful for the ever lorn,
now lost to a world wary and frightened,
proximity the new Devil’s door,
the prescribed chasm much more than the height of a man,
as hope for a brush of lock, a goodnight caress, are abandoned,
leaving the embraceless many.

The breakfast nook brightens,
suffused with impertinent sunlight,
arrogant, intrusive, disrupting dystopian
anticipations to dare yield the repressed,
now untethered from their despondent moorings:
grinning, chubby-faced sunflowers
electing a cadenced dance,
the pump, pump, pump of Hip Hop
thumping behind bodega counters,
the ponies of Assateague,
slick with lather and hope,
denuded thighs shifting in languid heat
atop hillocks of powdered sand,
the Jack Russell hurtling skyward,
disc clenched, her smooth white coat
suspended against nimbus curls
tossed carelessly upon a blue-black canvas,
Aquinnah, hallowed, striated escarpment,
resplendent at the shank of day,
fireflies, ice cream, and the irresistible beckon
of the evening pines that rock to the day’s completion,
whistling, familiar, reassuring.

Sirens fill the empty canyons, heralds of a deadly spring,
while the images repeat and repeat and repeat across the screen.
Masked faces telling desperate stories of flooded hallways
and gasping hours, of fear, exhaustion, and despair,
of knocks on nursing home windows, of face-time deaths,
and worse, the prospect of triage roulette.

But outside, many fall silently, alone, as they lived,
remembered only by a neighbor’s tardy knock,
or atop the sidewalk grate, as they lived, and have now passed,
quietly, still forgotten, untallied in the daily count, to fill the trenches
of potter’s field that beckon the unclaimed, to be bagged and sheathed
and to soldier in neat rows, uncounted once last time.

The deadbolt turns and we move silently
along the perimeter,
cats marking our territory,
while panes sparkle,
portals into the nothingness below.
We sit and wait.
And wonder.