That Domestic Animal
My damn cat brings me a dead songbird,
wren or finch, I don’t know what it is—
I mistook at first its folded grey
for a strangely shaped piece of lint
in the cubicle beneath my desk—nor which
cat for I have two: Cricket with her dense
body and stubby legs who jumps down
from every shelf so reverberatingly, I call
her the Black Bomb, or Ingrid, the quiet
Russian Blue, whom I call Gritty because
her coat is stealthy with dust. They’re always
leaving me offerings—the mouse upon
the threshold when I return from some
trip, the redheaded grosbeak on the sill—
but death is different in the front yard
or even on the threshold, than Death
on a particular morning, crawling into the house,
carrying a warm form frozen in its warm mouth,
tongue and tooth salivating a fluff of warble and whistle
into a smoothly folded, iced, silenced thing, Death
triumphant, affectionate! as if anyone would be happy
feeding upon dead songs torn from the air.
Copyright Credit: Rebecca Seiferle, "That Domestic Animal" from Wild Tongue. Copyright © 2007 by Rebecca Seiferle. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Wild Tongue (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)