The White Cat, Summer or Home Neutering at the Kitchen Table

The White Cat, Summer

or Home Neutering at the Kitchen Table

“Human madness is

 …a cunning and most feline thing.

When you think it fled, it may have but become

transfigured into some still subtler form.”          

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Hardly a sterile place, our kitchen

table was not where I imagined

him going under, if I imagined it

at all, my friendly handling

until that little squeeze between

the third and fourth claw—because

at that point he was a number

of thirty or more and

even though he was a stunning flaw,

a fluke of pure white in a mostly variegated

litter, someone decided he didn’t need

his balls, and neutering was cheaper

than spaying all those females who were rolling

around outside in the mid-June

sawdust, some gone beneath a visitor’s

car maybe to stay when the car moved

and they did not.

His sisters and brothers and cousins and uncles, all his kin

would scream at night, and growl and crouch

in that stay away come closer allure

I didn’t understand as anything other

than tufts of fur drifting

across the dirt driveway, or stuck

in the mud, the girl somewhere else

licking herself, dazed by a different needle,

in an as yet unchanged

little body barely more than a kitten—

So catching him seemed easy, it was meat

in the palm of my hand and a seat

on the porch, it was patience with flies

who smelled it too, it was all next to

the unsplit woodpile and the path to the shed

where he’d had to choose

between two aromas

and once he ate, because he wasn’t

a trout and I didn’t jerk the line,

I hummed and scooped his matted fur into me, all

skeletal wild, and cuddled him into

the kitchen where the man who spent

summers as our neighbor smiled his gentle

ease, an ease, if I may leap out here,

I never saw at that table,

and I wanted him to stay, I wanted him

to wait while I caught all twenty

or more male cats just so I could see

the sea he floated in inside himself,

a Li Po sea complete with moon to fall into…

and that’s what I did—unwashed

meat stained hands—I swayed in his moon

and boat at the whiff of the anesthesia

the slight let of bladder and bowels, the thin

sheet absorbing none of it as it soaked

through to where, in a couple of hours,

I’d sit and eat potatoes and cube steak

all lump and dry as old shoe while the white cat

didn’t wake up in the box he convalesced in.