A cat once walked off the roof into our garden
landing like a table on all fours.
We found a fieldmouse curled on linoleum
with paws drawn up
in an attitude of prayer.
In the clear balloon of the fishbowl
the goldfish make perfect breathy O’s.
One fish, orange in the watery stratosphere
where the water is thin and dangerous,
floats upside down like a flag in distress.
Locked in that lunatic position,
the fish is a moon out of orbit,
out of grace with gravity; and, World,
has turned its back on you completely
and is wed to its new element, the sky.
What laws govern our houses,
our civilized many-roomed coffins above ground,
that invite these creatures to tunnel or chew
into our lives. Are ears and noses caves,
environments the insects find hospitable,
as in helicoptic circles they navigate
our sleeping heads. Is it accidental,
then, how they seem to swim closer to us in death,
or fall out of the sky like small
oddly-shaped chunks of heaven?
They occupy our lives so briefly,
the insect rocking in the bowl of its shell,
the fish pumped up to the water’s breakable surface,
in death appear less innocent
than the shapes our minds invent.
Imposing on us, a kind of isolation,
they seem much more human than we are;
when, solitary and cautious, they watch us
lie in our formal positions
in the deep grass, in the woods, together.
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