Barometric

After the October sky's unbleached-fabric color
above the Federal Building and God's snapshot
of me and the bankruptcy lawyer shaking hands,
after a palmful of flawed diamonds sold
to a slick-haired salesman, certificates of deposit
canceled and debts discharged, there was still the cat
confined, for the first time, to the house, and he
wanted out. Nose-to-the-crack-in-the-door out.
Still-strong-enough-at-seventeen-to-tear-
the-carpet-from-beneath-the-lintel out.
Gothic-slowly-break-ten-fingers-on-a-blackboard-
meowing-turned-into-a-grating-howl out.
So we would go.

Had I not let him stop to sniff the dead end
of every branch beside the path that climbs
around the knotted veins of the maples, the hill
littered with plastic, amber glass, and a quick worm
levering its length onto a leaf, he wouldn't, in
increments of days, have led me to the meadow,
a dead seminary's yard, overgrown, free
in lowering dark. I had the city, its panoramic
scroll I didn't know I'd find, and the cat,
jog-trotting as if the walk were something
he had to do for urban me — close-reading
a tree's hollow and the blackberry canes'
unaesthetic tangle he'd belly-crawl beneath
and turn around, composed, to look at me.

I started to clean, picking up a can or two
each day, something to do while businessmen
advanced toward polished cars in guarded lots.
Like commerce, I expanded, collecting oxidizing
springs, socks, a tie, in rain that needled dust to lace.
We were nearly happy: the cat gnawing
on grass that he might not throw up, the leaking
braille of poison ivy blind in its advance
across my arch. In birdsong and its counterpoint,
the hourly bus's diesel grind, the two of us were
private, hermeneuts behind a broken building.

Someone, driving west into the Berkshires late
those afternoons, could never have seen or even
dreamed us: on an orange leash, a woman
deep in rubbishy thoughts, walked by a gray tabby
through waste land the Mass Pike passes: how,
as the rain came harder, and she bent to lift him,
the warm world twisted in her arms.

Janet Sylvester
The Georgia Review
Volume LIX, Number 4
Winter 2005

Copyright © 2005 by the University of Georgia.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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