Sunday, September 29, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 369: Biomythography - Note 107: The Frog Rebellion

The Frog Rebellion

The rebellion was led by college students, I think. That's just a guess.

I first encountered the frogs along a strip of forest that ran alongside a stream in the park next to my home. The water came from springs and drainage pipes farther north. It burbled southwards to a tiny, concrete bridge, just twenty feet long and six feet high. Of course, eventually the stream ran under the bridge, through the woods, and emptied into Paint Branch Creek. But it was a long and marshy hike to where the waters joined. 

There had always been turtles along the stream. They liked the mixture of shade and sun. They probably enjoyed the shelter of trees and rocky ground, too, with plenty of hiding places. My friend Joe found more than I did. He usually found more of any reptile. I searched, but not in a focused way. I wandered through the stream beds, hunting and hoping for curiosities. I uncovered occasional turtles, snakes, tadpoles, frogs, and minnows. One day, I ventured into the shaded waters with my younger brother. He turned around a corner in a forest trail and sprinted back to me, alarmed.

"There's a monster frog," he huffed.

"Is it a frog or a toad?" I wasn't bothered. He should have known not to get too excited about either one.

"I don't know. It's big." He moved his hands to almost a shoulder width apart. Even at his size, a few years younger than me, he was describing ridiculous dimensions for a frog. "Really big."

"Right." I hopped up out of the stream and marched up the trail.

Part of me expected to find nothing at all. My brother had probably seen a sort-of-large toad that moved into the underbrush as soon as he turned his back. On the other side of the tree, though, I found a thing. It hadn't moved. Maybe it felt no need to move, ever. It was larger than a box turtle. It was larger than most of the slabs of shale rock.

I took a step back. It was so large, I didn't want to get close. It couldn't be natural, here.

Whatever it was, it did look like a frog. But instead of being the size of my fist, it was at least eight to ten inches long. It was almost as fat, too, seven inches at the widest part of its belly. Instead of being forest colored, this creature was brownish-green with a pale, mottled, grey-tan underbelly.

"Wow," I breathed, after a few seconds had passed and I'd caught my breath enough to speak.

"See?" My little brother hovered behind me. He wanted to make sure the animal got me first, if it attacked. He put his left hand on my right shoulder.

"Huh." My gaze narrowed. This creature hadn't moved while I'd been watching it.

Maybe it was a rubber model. Maybe it was real, but dead. I had to find out. I wasn't putting my fingers near it, though. There were such things as poison frogs, after all. Instead, I shook off my brother's hand. Then I searched around and got a stick.

"Don't leave!" my brother hissed. I knew what he meant. This thing looked weird and out of place. He didn't want to stand too close to it. And he especially didn't want me to run off and ditch him.

"It's okay." I broke the stick to make it into the right length. Then I crept forward. "I just want to see if it's real."

"Don't do it!" My brother clenched his fists. He crouched to flee, as if he thought I could set off the animal like a bomb. Maybe he was right, but it sure didn't seem to move much.

I poked the frog. The frog blinked. It breathed rapidly, as if alarmed while being half-paralyzed. I saw its throat vibrate. It took one step. After a moment, it took another. Then it settled on its haunches. As far as the frog was concerned, it had moved far enough.

"It's alive." Okay. Now I had to think.

On the way in, I had noticed clutches of frog eggs in the water. They had looked like translucent grapes with black dots in the middle. Some of the eggs had been normal sized. Some had seemed oddly large, though.

We had gotten rain a few days ago. The water level had risen in the stream. The level had receded since, which resulted in tide pools next to the banks of the stream. Most of those stagnant pools had eggs in them. In total, our stream had accumulated hundreds of eggs, at least. And I thought only some of the eggs were normal. A few clutches were huge, several times the size of eggs that our local frogs produced.

"Let's go get Joe," I suggested. I knew my best friend in the neighborhood would want to see. Besides, Joe was two years older than me and his dad was some kind of bug-collecting scientist. Frogs weren't too different. At least, they ate bugs.

When we returned with Joe - prying him away from his family at their table took effort, although we were greatly aided by our breathless urgency in summoning him to see the giants - he was awed, at first. He quickly grew bewildered, as I'd expected, but the sight of the eggs also led him to a leap of logic.

"There have to be others," he said, staring at a clutch of frog jellies bigger than two of his fists together. "Let's find them."

The chore ended up being easy. There weren't many places for the frogs to hide. We found one on the trail, plainly visible, and it walked under a bush only when we shouted and ran up to it. Another, we found under a large fern on the banks of the stream. Soon, we located another. And another.

"At least five," Joe said.

"Are they weird?"

"This is really cool," he breathed. For a second, he tensed, as if he were on the verge of peeing himself. "Really, really."

The giants seemed oddly unafraid of us. We dashed from place to place, studying them, although no individual frog seemed to be doing much of anything interesting or, indeed, much of anything at all. Eventually, we got bored and went to play games on the ball fields in the park. But we vowed to return. Joe mumbled he wanted to take eggs to grow in an aquarium.

Later in the week, after Joe talked with his father, he concluded these were most likely specimens of American Bullfrog. They were too big to be anything else.

"Someone captured them for dissection, my father says." Joe shook his head at the craziness. "But I guess students set them free. Probably at the university."

A few weeks later, I wandered along the stream and noticed it was full of tadpoles. Nearly all the deep puddles on each bank had filled up with wriggling green-black creatures with thick bodies and eel-like tails. I reached in and picked up a mid-sized individual. It wriggled frantically in my fist, so I put it down. I crouched to study a group of them in their home.

Usually, I could hold tadpoles by making a cup of water in my hands. The tadpoles would swim around in the water for a while as I got my up-close look. These specimens, though, were a bit large for that. Some of them were already longer than my fingers. A few of them would have filled my cupped hands entirely, leaving almost no room for water.

I thought about all the frogs we were about to see.

In another week, I headed into the woods around the stream for an inspection. Sun poked through the boughs above me. Mostly in the shade but in a sunny spot, too, I found a half-dozen sizable frogs, for sure younger than their bigger mothers and fathers. Some of the frogs still had their tadpole tails. They were already bigger than our normal frogs, though. And they were growing pretty fast.  

When I mentioned it to Joe, he didn't seem as excited.

"They don't really belong here." He shrugged. "That's what my dad says."

A few days later, I walked through and saw even more frogs. There were almost no tadpoles left anywhere. A while after, though, my younger brother and I hiked in another check-up. This time, we found a bunch of dead frogs. Some of them were lying on their backs. At first, I thought they were pretending.

"What happened?" asked my brother in a hushed tone.

"I don't know." I picked up a stick from the trail. With it, I poked one of the frogs lying on its back.

"Don't do that," said my brother.

There was no sign of an injury. There was no obvious killer. The first body seemed stiff. The next, which I found under a bramble beside a tree, felt mushy through the poke of the stick. Whether that meant it had just died recently or had died before the others, I didn't know.

My brother and I hiked fifty yards downstream. We saw a few live frogs, big ones, but they hopped away from us. That was good. Most of the other frogs, though, were just dead bodies.

A rainstorm swept through the next day. It was three more days before the ground got firm enough for us to hike back along the path of the stream.

"Now everything is dead," my brother murmured.

"Yeah." This time, there was a deceased box turtle among the reptile corpses. We saw dead toads, which looked awfully small and warty. We saw minnows that had gone belly up. We found a drowned mouse, too, or at least something soft, furry, and washed up against a fallen tree branch. Finally, on the east side of the trail, I stumbled upon a larger, older box turtle that was still walking. It looked sick.

The turtle's shell and even its limbs seemed speckled by pale spots. I felt amazed and impressed by its hardiness inasmuch as it had survived a severe devastation, at least so far.

"A storm never killed everything before," I said to my brother. I was trying to think of why this one had been different.

"I've never seen so many animals dead." His eyes were wide. He looked to me for answers but I felt as bewildered as he was.

We never heard a good explanation, although my parents suggested pollution. It's a possible reason. At this distance in time, there's no way for me to know for sure what killed those frogs. The foremost possibilities:

a) The park service found out and set poison to prevent the transplanted frogs from taking over
b) A factory upstream dumped something. In that case, the water was always going to kill the animals downstream and it got especially bad when swollen flood waters carried even more pollution to them
c) A disease, possibly borne by the transplanted frogs, infected most of the reptiles
d) Our local park animals ate insects poisoned by insecticide

Whatever ended it, the frog rebellion lasted only for a spring and a summer. And it was probably started by college students.

Sunday, September 22, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 368: Biomythography - Note 106: Apocalypse Horses

Apocalypse Horses

I used to visit the equestrian ring about a block from our house in College Park. A University of Maryland riding club had gotten permission to build their facility in an unused sector of the park. They didn't bring horses into the place often, so I had time to explore it on most afternoons. The builders made the fences white and the roofs green. They painted the obstacles for the horse agility training with the same color scheme, green blocks and white rails. They put up a lot of fencing, too, and that was also white. All of it grew a bit dingy within a few months.

Usually I played in the dirt of the main ring or in the stalls. Sometimes, I found wood chips or stacks of straw. I found a dime once, and later a nickel. I returned to the same spot for weeks, hoping for more fallen coins.

On a day when the women and men brought horses, I stood off to the side and leaned against the fence. Every now and then, riders took their horses through the agility training course. Most of the horses seemed good, not flawless, but resilient about the obstacles and hurdles. 

I watched for half an hour or more, like a kid with nothing to do, and I was surprised to see two horses shy away from the hurdles, one after the other. The second of them refused the smallest cross-bar, basically a step-over hop. I guessed that making horses jump took training like when I taught cats or dogs at home. Cats were pretty hard to persuade, too. How the riders negotiated with their much larger animals, I had no idea. 

Most of the dressing up in burgundy jackets and participating in this weird hobby fell into the realm of adulthood mysteries, a large category to my mind, so I didn't give it much thought. Adults hardly ever explained their habits. Eventually that afternoon, the riders started packing up to leave. This was, itself, a mystery. One man seemed to do most of it. 

A young woman rode off to the side and watched her fellow riders. After a moment, she encouraged her mount to sidle up to me.

“Do you like horses?” she asked. She had blondish hair in what appeared to be a mop-top cut underneath her helmet.

"Yeah ... it pooped!" My voice rose in pitch. Her animal had relieved itself suddenly, with a great plopping sound and smell. And it had done so as automatically as a fish or a bird. It had given no thought to its rider or me or, indeed, anything at all before letting go. 

"Yes, horses do that." Her voice grew slightly tired.

I couldn't get over how it just stood there and did its business.

"But it pooped!" I pointed in case she'd missed it.

"Yes."

I rested my chin on my hand, still propped against the fence, and thought about how I would handle this at home. "Can you train it to poop in the straw or something?"

"Uh," she hesitated. "Horses eat straw. So no."

The conversation went on for a while. I'm sure I served as an inadvertent advertisement for birth control to the girl. The ways in which horses were so different from other pets seemed unbelievable to me then. I could not buy a clue about the behaviors she was trying to describe. Also, she was telling me her animal was smart. But it wasn't smart enough not to step in its own poop. 

She let me pet her horse on the nose. It shivered and gave a sort of laughing sound.

"Did I do something funny?" I glanced from the horse to the rider.

"That was a whinny." By this point in our conversation, she could meet me at my level of understanding. "She makes that noise sometimes."

Although we talked a while longer, the young woman found a way to excuse herself from the conversation. Maybe she got called away to help pack. In either case, since watching grown-ups walk their horses on leads, stack obstacle cones, drag blocks to the fence, and fix rails was only moderately interesting, I wandered off.

I returned a week later to watch another team of riders lead horses by the reins, talk to one another, walk around, tie their beasts to the posts, and start a training session. Not long after, I came back to the equine ring to watch part of a competition. This was a vastly different experience - more cars, more trucks, and more people. The contestants seemed entirely competent in a grown-up way, which I took for granted. There was a very old-looking man, probably nearly thirty, who performed perfectly with his mount as they leapt over the most difficult hurdles, every one of them, without a flaw.

I watched the training sessions and competitions for two years more. They got boring, in a comfortable way, and I stopped by to watch them less often, partly because the place was getting too popular with adults who asked questions or stood in my way, partly because for my eighth birthday I received a five-speed bicycle, a spyder with high, raised handlebars and a banana seat. As I found myself more mobile, I realized I had friends to visit, a bowling alley to lurk in, magazines to read for free at a newsstand, and more I could do on the roads beyond my neighborhood. 

Upon returning from my bike trips, sometimes I slowed down to see the horse club. 

One day as I rode out on my bike, the insecticide trucks swept through. They sprayed a heavy mist that smelled hot, like menthol but worse. It fell on the grass, the trees, the streams, and the pond - everywhere. It wasn't DDT, I realized, but it was something else the local park monitors had decided was good for us. Whatever it was, it made my lungs ache. I recognized it as an insecticide that had given me breathing problems before. I pedaled out of there. 

When I returned, I sped through the smelling-awful zone and ignored the horse trailers. I kept going west until I hit University Boulevard. I turned down the wrong way on the shoulder of the road, and checked out the next set of houses to see if any kids would play. 

The yards looked empty, so I headed back home. As I came to my house, though, I noticed whirling lights farther up ahead, east into the park. 

"You're finally back," my mother said. I walked my bike inside our chain-link fence.

"There's no kids out," I complained. "I'm gonna make a sandwich. There are some ambulances and fire trucks near the horse ring. I'm gonna go see."

"No. Definitely not," my mother said. She held the door for me as we walked inside.

"But why?"

"There's nothing to see."

"That's okay." I turned the corner into the kitchen. I headed past my father, who was at the table reading, and pulled on the handle of the fridge with the idea of putting together ketchup and cheese on wonder bread. Maybe I could grab a pickle, too. "I'll stay to the side. I'll just look at the horses."

"No," my father insisted.

"The horses are dead," my mother told me. I turned to find her only a foot to my right. She had followed me all the way through the kitchen. 

"Why?" For the moment, I put the ketchup back on the shelf. I closed the refrigerator. 

"No one knows."

"All of the horses?" My feet took me in a circle around my mother in the kitchen. She had wanted to make sure I knew this.

"I think so."

"But ..." Finally, I stopped. I tried to think of how this was even possible. 

"Didn't they spray something on the grass this morning?" she asked. The tone of her voice told me she already knew the answer.

"Yeah." It had been the menthol-hot stuff. I hadn't been able to ignore it. 

My parents exchanged a meaningful look. 

"Horses eat grass," commented my mother, arms folded.

"Yes," said my father.

"Do you think they nibbled on the sprayed grass?" she asked. The question, by her glance and raised eyebrows, was meant for me. I tried to think. I hadn't paid attention to the arriving horse trailers. I had no answer.

"All of them?" I wondered. I couldn't comprehend the totality of it.

"They must have," my father said. 

It turned out my parents were right. According to our neighbors who had gone to see the what the ambulances were doing, and according to their kids as well, all the horses at the equine competition had died. Every single one. Why ambulances had come for the horses, I had no idea. Maybe no one at the equine competition, with their animals dying, knew what to do. Someone had simply driven to a payphone to dial for emergency help. And the ambulances came.

That was the end of the equine sports club. They never met in the park near my home again.

#

A friend of mine pointed out that pesticide poisoning incidents for horses, although common enough to be noticeable (https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eve.12887 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11780282/ for examples), are relatively rare. Mold-infected feed appears to be the most common cause of herd die-offs in our modern era.

Does this mean I'm remembering wrong? In this case, probably not. The recollection is a latticework of small things. I tell the story as two incidents but, in my mental background, the incidents are supported by many, many other brief but clear fragments. I don't doubt the horse club and stables. I don't doubt the insecticide sprayings. I don't doubt the abrupt shutdown of the horse club or the ambulances associated with it. I don't even doubt my parents explaining it to me (although the dialogue must be inaccurate) or my friends telling me their versions of the news later.

What I do doubt is everyone being right about the cause of death. If the feed were poisoned that day, our neighborhood would have been likely to a) not know, and b) blame the deaths on the most obvious cause, which was the insecticide spray. It does, on the surface, seem like insecticides are still a reasonable culprit. In contrast to the superficial evidence, though, it's significant that I'm remembering from the perspective of a child. No one told me the full facts as if I were grown. And the horse club folks didn't talk to our neighborhood residents anyway. If they figured it out a couple days later and the cause was determined to be contaminated feed, would they have come back to correct the record with the kids in the neighborhood? No. So there is still a decent chance that the more common cause, bad feed, resulted in those horse deaths.



Sunday, September 15, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 367: Biomythography - Note 105: Silent Summer

Silent Summer

Every spring, dump trucks drove down Metzerott Road with spray cannons mounted on top. They made a full circuit, both sides of the road, to hose down the trees. The trucks arrived month after month, year after year. Usually, they turned onto Patricia Court, too, and wetted the ornamental pear trees that never grew pears. Often, our neighborhood got weekly treatments in May, June, and July.

As a child, I felt more mystified by the concept of pear trees without fruit than I was by the spray trucks. Like the rest of the neighborhood kids, I played in the spray. It wasn't fun but we didn’t let the chemical mist stop a baseball game or kickball game. At worst, we slipped in the grass and got drenched. Any other inconvenience seemed unimportant. The moist air from the trucks smelled weird but it was interesting, too. It wasn’t quite like anything else. The oddness of it lingered around the leaves of the trees and settled like dew in the grass and stayed there for an hour or so. 

When the trucks turned onto Patricia court, the neighborhood adults stood in their front yards, arms folded, and nodded at the drivers, obviously happy to have their share of the spraying. Their rows of trees harbored gypsy moths and tent caterpillars according to the adults I'd heard, so they felt they needed this DDT solution. 

In the third summer, something changed. The trucks rolled through, distributing their chemical coverings as usual but the adults reacted differently.

“Come in! Come inside!” my mother called to us from her front door.
 
"What's wrong?" I trotted in her direction. My little brother followed. 

"I don't want you playing out in the field when they're spraying it."

"But mom!"

"Come on! Anyway, doesn't it smell awful?" She wrinkled her nose. She hadn't remarked on it any of the times before. I didn't mind the smell and she hadn't until now. But she remained at the door, hands on hips, and stared at me until I trudged inside.

The next time the trucks passed through and the next, my mother's reaction was the same. She waved me indoors. Other parents called their children into their houses, too. By the middle of summer, my protests over being called in had weakened because our games were getting broken up even when I was the last to get the summons. There was no point in staying if most of us were forbidden to play. 

Later, on the south side of the house with other adults, my parents chatted on the porch outside our kitchen doorway. It was a nice day and everyone but my mother wanted to smoke in the breeze. 

"Do you really think DDT is bad?" another woman asked my mother.

For her response, my mother turned to me. I found it slightly alarming.
 
"Didn't you tell me you saw a flock of dead birds?" she asked. 

"Yeah," I answered warily. Mostly, I had seen single birds. A few times, I had seen groups of them. Once, I walked through an entire flock, a wide, green field full of greyish birds lying mostly on their backs with their legs and beaks to the sky. I had poked a couple of the bodies with a stick. They proved to be weirdly firm.
 
"That could have been a disease," someone volunteered, a man's voice. 

"I don't think it was," said my mother.

"They're spraying for insects," said a woman. "That's all they're killing. The insects." 

"The birds eat insects," my mother said.

"I thought they ate worms," said a man who hadn't spoken.

The conversation flowed back and forth for a while. I wandered down the stairs and back up, hoping to see other kids in the neighborhood playing outside. But there wasn't even a dog in view. All I had was some adults acting like adults.

Someone asked my mother if she had read 'Silent Spring.' She nodded. For the first time in a while, my father spoke up.

"Ann thinks Rachel Carson is a saint," he said.  

"I hear she died of cancer," someone murmured. 

The group puffed their cigars and cigarettes in silence for a moment. My mother scowled and turned away. My father nodded to his guests. 

#

In the process of writing this down, I seemed to remember something nonsensical. It happens in the recall process. Generally, I drop the nonsense details if they aren't vital to the story; I have to ignore them.

This time, when I pictured my mother talking about the book by Rachel Carson, I remembered her standing outside the door to our kitchen in Patricia Court. It could only have been a true, exterior door. It could only have exited from the kitchen. It could only have been placed high up, too, a full story off the ground so it required a staircase.

Clearly, such a house configuration is foolish. I've seen a lot of living spaces since I lived in College Park. In none of them have I seen an outside door attached to the side of the home in the middle of its kitchen and dining room. Who would design a space that way? Why would anyone buy into the design? Is it helpful to have an extra kitchen exit when the front door to the house is fifteen feet away? No.

Why have the side door leave the house at a full story above the ground? You'd have to turn a corner immediately as you stepped out. Or turn as you came in, bearing an armload of groceries.

And yet, when I pictured my mother talking about Rachel Carson, there she was outside the phantom-like side door next to the kitchen, talking with her friends as they leaned against the metal rails around the landing and stairs.

I doubted myself; I wanted to drive to the old family home and see. But we live in an era when that's not strictly necessary. It occurred to me I could take advantage of the most obvious alternative and browse to Google Street View. There, I found my childhood home. But the side of the house I wanted to see wasn't visible. I virtually stepped to the house next door. And turned right. And there it was, the side door of my childhood home precisely as I remembered it.

It makes no sense. It's up there, off the kitchen and dining room, one story off the ground.

#

When I was five or six, every drive on University Boulevard seemed to involve cleaning bug guts off windshields. In fact, everywhere we drove, whether to visit relatives, run errands, visit Amish country, spend a day at the beach, or go any place at all (well, anywhere except a big city), we had to clean the windshields. We did it constantly. We cleaned and cleaned. Gas stations provided good tools for it. 

Recently, on a trip through some states in the midwest that included North Dakota and Montana, I was reminded of the need to clean windshields. Driving through, we saw bugs hitting our car. I felt I'd been transported in time. Large insects have been missing on the east coast of the United States for most of my life. They stopped hitting windshields when I reached my teens. They died out so slowly, I didn't really notice. They had been a constant rain against the cars, once. But the downpour of bodies thinned out. And then it was gone. 

More noticeable than the insects, maybe, were the birds. When I was six, flocks of birds covered the sky at times, end to end. The swarms were big enough to cast checkered shadows from one side of the park to the other. Those thinned out, too, and although I still see birds, they travel in what my mother would have called small flocks.

"Very small," she would say. 

Yes, flocks are all small, now. 

#

A small detail: as I remember the house better, I can hear the clang of my feet on the steps outside the door off the kitchen and dining room. Those steps were metal. They made a ringing sound that, over the reach of decades, feels haunting - clear, memorable, but distant and forever lost. 

Sunday, September 8, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 366: Fifteen Pages About Daffodils

Fifteen Pages About Daffodils

It should never be illegal to write about daffodils
but maybe fifteen pages of verse 
on daffodils
should result in a warning from the court
instead of publication 
and eventual enshrinement in the curriculum,
that's all I'm saying. 

Maybe the poem is a metaphor for something else,
a beat-generation, wandering prose-story
not about yellow petals so much
as hookers, nuns, heroin, and blues music.
But as I'm scanning page one
I see a lot of green leaves and coronas,
floral tubes and ovaries,
tepals, pollen, and stamen.

The poet really loves this flower. 
And details.

A flip through pages two and three features 
petals hanging down or erect, 
bulbs and stems, 
stalks, sap, terminal buds
and a shotgun blast of small, round stains
where a previous reader sneezed
while drinking diet cola.

Skip to page seven, 
and, thank heavens, it's different.
We are down in the roots
in the dark, bacterial soil,
shrinking down with the bulb
full of black seeds
and maybe the the depths of the poet's soul 
or so I think we are meant to gather.
It's death and rebirth, death and rebirth,
all the way down.

Down to page fourteen, scanning ahead 
and sadly, the bud is bursting forth.
We're probably going to get a reprise of page one
as we're slipping off our
membranous tunic,
pushing away the corky stern
and seeing coronas once again,
like an acid trip without dropping acid,
full of tepals and floral tubes.

The last verse, on page fifteen, 
is still about daffodils.
There's not a broken bottle
nor a cigarette stub in sight,
not a hippie, nor an innocent child,
not even a poet,
someone to ponder life's lesson
or wonder what it's all about.
Well, it's about fifteen pages, dude.

And that's my poem
about a poem 
about fifteen pages
on daffodils. 


  -- Eric Gallagher

Sunday, September 1, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 365: Just Another Pet

Just Another Pet

She was just another pet 
for fourteen years.

We let her have the lickings.
She served as our canine dishwasher, a job she loved
and we loved to see her take an interest in her work.

During dinner, she waited in the next room, 
studying our shadows in silence, tail at half wag,
thumping to full rhythm when I stopped by her hallway bed
to pet and hug, to let her sniff my ear and cheek. 

When the family rose from the table, she listened 
for the clink of a plate against the floor
and clambered from her cushion. 

It was as good as calling her name.

Summoning her brown, smooth body to work,
no longer hunting or herding, 
just watching the family, drumming her tail,
helping us clear plates 
- she wiggled herself all over
as she sniffed and started to clean.

Now I stand at the sink 
and every plate I pick up, I turn and look,
searching for her. 
Her bed is not empty. We have other pets.
Today, her favorite cat rests there, alone.

But I remember her. 
And I put down the plate to think. 
I have adjusted
except when I remember her job.
I sigh and rinse the dishes
and turn to pick up a bowl, unwashed,
and think of her again. 


 -- Eric Gallagher