A True Story about a Cat and Possum, and: For a Sixtieth Birthday

Abstract

A True Story about a Cat and Possum, and: For a Sixtieth Birthday Michael Collier (bio) A TRUE STORY ABOUT A CAT AND POSSUM You can give a cat a name but you can't call one your own,even if you feed him, even if in the below-zero of winterhe sleeps, as our stray, "Goofy," does, on a heated pad,inside a large Amazon.com box, covered with worn-out,braided kitchen rugs and retired bath towels, and evenif he pretends to answer when you call, he's not your cat. He's an emissary from the world of the lost, an e?migre?,who wears the story of his dispossession in a torn,cauliflower ear that is less an ear than a sonic periscope,detecting the softest signals of mice and vole. Its rakish bent,like a French beret—"Parlez-vous franc?ais, Monsieur Le Chat?" "Only in your dreams," he meows back, stretching out two stiff legsbefore he rolls over like a fat, orange, gargantuan tick. And speaking of ticks, possums are great eaters of the deer tickby way of grooming themselves, also consumers of snails, mice,and rats, and impervious to rabies as well as various poisonsand venoms, including rattlesnake. Good partners in the ecologyof the garden, and like great poets and savants, prone to seizuresthat leave them paralyzed, open-mouthed, an hour or more,in a state over which they have no control. That's how we found it, under the full force of our car's head lights, "curled up," you could say,on a storage bin, next to Goofy's Amazon house, looking homelessin its nakedness—the thick, pink cordage of tail, hairless, electrocuted.Other times, under the car's bright interrogation, we found it eating Goofy's food,not even looking up or shying away, although once, like a spy, it hidbehind a plastic bucket, its anteater nostrils and one obsidian pearl eye visible. [End Page 506] FOR A SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY When I see you coming up the drive, broad, striped headband covering your hair and ears, your legs solid,tan from a million miles of walking, and when I see your arms swinging at your sides, hands loose at mid-thigh, a T-shirtappearing to be clothes-pinned to your shoulders, and maybe hear your shoes scuff and drag or maybe hear you stop to look back from where you'd beento check again the view of fields and river you love more deeply than I, and when I hear you talking to the barn cat who trots to greet you(like a cat acting like a dog), or maybe you've stopped to pull weeds, re-stake a toppling hollyhock, then I knowthat forgetting, as if you'd never been away, had been crucial to seeing in your absence how much I missed you. [End Page 507] Michael Collier MICHAEL COLLIER's eighth collection, The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming 2021 (University of Chicago). A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, he teaches at the University of Maryland and is a director emeritus of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. Copyright © 2020 Michael Collier