By Ken Meisel
When we were fighting, just after the toast & marmalade & coffee, I saw who she was, as a little girl, in all the other lives; she was kneeling under a bush, petting the injured, scabby kitten there, so it wouldn’t suffer alone in the weeks before it was crushed under the tires of a car. In Amsterdam it was raining, in Iowa, the snow had angel–misted over the mangled corn fields where the wind howled as it marauded across the naked burrows & into the open pig barn like a sliced hurt, ripping a black dress apart &, in Paris, a couple softly read the newspaper & I could see that she was in all three places, petting a dying kitten so that she could see it forever – in a perfectly still mirror – & never take her two eyes off it so she could coax it somewhere, where it could fall out of time & into eternity, just like her. That’s what I saw. When she coaxed me to kiss her & make her real, I saw the ruined kitten, which sits underneath a cold bush inside all love. The sirens outside were wailing & something was on fire – a long time ago – & we were above it. I can’t explain that anymore. But the dead kitten in every marriage is what we love. It’s a coaxing, all this loving, it’s a coaxing across a chasm with a kitten in it, way down below us. After that, the coaxing is mystery, it’s a faceless party card. It leads us wherever it needs us. She isn’t the hurt kitten. All of that is before us. A long time ago, before we were true. She is just the imago of the girl petting the injured kitten underneath a bush, so the kitten can fall into eternity & mean something about love. & happiness is something that gives itself to hurt, so that injured beauty can be real again, & be rescued from history, which wants to possess it; & to pet an injured kitten during the autumn when the leaves are a dome & the injured beings squat under them, waiting on time & whatever else will save them from memory or the imago of history, so that they’re free again to be enveloped by a lightness that carries them, means we are being kind to history, which needs us more than we need it; & so the imago of the girl petting the kitten is art, it is performance for existence, & I can’t explain it any more than that, except to say that coaxing fires something from nothing into life & I wanted that, anyway. & I wanted a world where a girl was coaxing an injured kitten to come with her to another place so it wouldn’t
be obliterated without one more soft hand caressing it &, besides, to coax something alive meant that history didn’t mean anything greater to me than what it could be, & I wanted that. & I don’t know what we thought it would be: all this entanglement in one another’s lives; these mornings of love–making, then silence, those other nights when the fighting we did, so hard, was like the Meat Cove waves in Nova Scotia that we stood over on our honeymoon, so shocked to see it: these waves hurling murderous against the hard–angled defense of rocks … & the submitting beach, receiving all the aftermath – so defenseless, so utterly receptive – which was history, anyhow – & history’s always being submissive to the facts that create it. History has a dead kitten in it… & a set of hands that miss it all the time as it free–falls. History imitates memory: both are imaginary friends. Just ghosts. Maybe history bullies those that ignore it, she said. & when she said that, which was after we were fighting, I saw the girl maybe in Amsterdam or in Paris, or in Iowa or Detroit, petting the injured cat; she was just kneeling there in the gray dusk, stroking the kitten’s head so it would know itself as a body with a hand on its head, being kind to it, so that the universe could feel what happens when we act before history & give something to it with a kindness that’s before what is true & sad; & it was just beginning to rain, we could hear its incessant, musical humming on the roof & in the gutters, on the lawns & in the vulnerable places where birds huddled in nests, & the raindrops were drenching & drowning the tall trees & also the Christmas light so that everything glistened in bright mystery, in beauty, & history is what we use to fool ourselves that we aren’t right here, holding one another & wanting bad for something better; & history’s full of stories & all the unchanged love in all that. & all these stories crush the ignorance of who we once were – if we let them, is what she said. & maybe the only remedy for an injured history is warm kindness – that coaxing of something back, from where it retreated from view. Now she’s undoing the buttons on her shirt, she’s opening herself up, so she can see the aging she’s worried about; it’s winter & the figure of her body – maybe sunburned by the summer that gave over to autumn & to winter – that was also the body of the girl in the dream, petting the injured kitten underneath a bush, is also submissive to the time that’s making it; &, it isn’t old or young at all: it’s just figure against a ground
making it all up. Even this poem’s making it all up, so it can coax me to remember it when I am in an airport hanger, trying to get to Denver. &, after a while, we train memory to recite life back to us, like it’s reciting a story, a made up story, a fairytale, a parable with coma & dead kitten in it. I didn’t make that lie up, History did. & after the sunburn, the red burning, there is a cooling off period that forgives, that releases the burned skin, the horror. & she drapes the cool bathrobe over her shoulders… & she says to me: history never bullies us: all it does is tell us what to be kind to, when we find it there, shivering like a rain– drenched kitten under a bush. All it does is that. That’s it, that’s all.
Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, Crab Creek Review and Rabid Oak.
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