I Liked Being

The mythological death daemon
rising from my consciousness and
laughing maniacally, the way my
father did in his sleep some nights
I also couldn’t sleep because
I heard a creature at the foot
of my bed breathing as if to
say your life is mine when I
say it is, stands at the crosswalk,
waiting for the walk signal to
turn on my wanting everything
to stop, and reminds me of my
sick cat I once thought hated me,

who, rather than go off in the
woods to die alone, as animals
often do, began to wait for me
on my bed, often leaving a little
blood stain on my side of it,
on top of which it would rest and
look back at me with eyes
filled with so much presence
it was impossible, while we held
one another, not to love her
more than I loved my father,
who, while he was alive, would
look back at me with those
same eyes after tucking me in
to say there’s no one in the world
I love more, now go to sleep.

Those same eyes I saw once in
another cat, I loved, who,
after being run over accidentally
in our driveway by my stepmom,
while it was trying to stay cool
under the Bronco, looked up
at me with only one recognizable
eye, and cried for yours truly,
the parent with the trash bag
and the shovel, to lean down close
and reassure the remaining three-
dimensional part of her that
there was a change that had merely
and unexpectedly happened,
but that I was still there to,
unequivocally, stay there for her,
which to her, was just as
much about me making sure she
didn’t have to leave me just yet.

I buried both of these love spirits
a few feet down, beside the house
while I said a few kind, hard, and
reassuring words others couldn’t
or wouldn’t say, just like the way
I said some at my father’s wake,
just like the way I’m saying these.

More than I was ever needed
by paws or hands wishing back and
forth against the blanket of being
so glad to see me again, I was
always needed for that. Moreso,
I’m pretty sure I just liked
being a kind of poet eulogist.