I need more time with you.  Reincarnation after reincarnation.  Please.

Please give me the awareness to compress this healthy fear into each day.  You are the ultimate blessing. 

When Adam would walk with God in the garden, did he take him for granted after a while?  Would his mind start to wander…? 

Yes, I’ll go about my business.  You go about yours.  But I can’t let hours slip by.  Can’t waste a night.  Or live distracted, eyes vacant, voice insincere.

I have to go toward you in the moment.

What is your mood?  What would you like to eat?

What should we do after work?  Having only scratched the surface of this city.  Dinner by the ocean, with the waves coming in.  A drink on a rooftop, thrust up into the sky—Icarus on one side, still doing well… 

Just driving down new streets, going deep in some maze open on all sides. 

A smooth ride, together in each second of the minute, each minute of the hour. 

More shared memories.  Brains somewhat fused.  Our brains, on some things, meet for a long kiss.  On others, you’re just over there, seductively half-veiled.

Please let me dig in.  Listen, say the right thing. Keep it light, the way a plant in the sun would speak.

Excitement for a very good reason.  Like those first dates, when the sense of you was dawning on me.  You, starting in my life from that point, and still expanding to this day.  I live in the onrush of spacetime…

A creature, unformed, a tadpole or fawn, stands in the shower spray.

Puts coconut on its amorphous body, coffee on its face.

Becomes a fabulous beast.  Scent of the body in the nostrils, scent of the face. 

Goes out into the world, into ancient Greece.  Is seen by the sibyls.  Becomes legendary, recorded later in bestiaries.

Is part of the collective unconscious, summoned every once in a long while by a painter or sculptor.  Appearing in a dream…

The tadpole or fawn turns up the force of the spray, washes clean. 

Now musk on its body, citrus on its face.  Both in the nostrils. Smooth on the body, gritty on the face.

Feels its own unlikely existence.  It works!  The transition rooted and flowing from the collarbones…

Goes forth naked onto the subway.  On four legs down the aisle, hooves clattering.  Finds a seat.   Shines.  Even in New York, people stare.  Smile, shiver.

In the shower, it continues to live, the lifespan goes on.  Studying the swirling steam, deflected spray…

Runs out onto the plains.  Unique, but not lonely.  The creature of coconut and coffee galloping alongside.

Cats on the sand.  In the same glare that’s burning through my sunblock!

Loving warmth is one thing.  On the rug near a cozy radiator. 

This seems unnatural, lizard-like. The black long-hairs, the gray tabbies, roasting…

*

The promenade, a strip of concrete running for miles between the wall of hotel towers and the ocean.

Bordered by a waist-high tunnel of green—mangroves and other tropical shrubs.

And home to a long, attenuated colony of cats, fed by a charity.  Food and water in bowls like mileposts, with cats plopped nearby.  

Emerging from the undergrowth at set times; the workers making their rounds to find them primly sitting.

Slight uneasy feeling of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’.

Well-fed, not scrawny, thank God, with sick blazing eyes.

But more detached than most, toward people, toward each other…

In the eternal summer, the runners, bikers, bladers go by, half-naked.

A homeless woman is rinsing herself in an outdoor shower.  Takes off her thin dress.  The most beautiful body of all.  

For a moment, overshadowing even the ocean…

The water, seen through breaks in the eye-level canopy, sloshes slowly today, with the consistency of cream.

Meanwhile, the cats sprawl in a slight gully, or sleep in mangrove shadow.  A few are deeper in, prowling the brittle undergrowth, on their version of deer paths.

There are very few strays in the rest of the city.  They’ve all come here, in a persistent migration to the east, to the ocean.

Cleaning salt with the sand from their fur.

Are there families, friends here, circulating?  How does it all work?

Do they miss the comforts of a home?  The human touch? 

None of them beseech us.  None of them even look up.  Both wild and zoo-like.

Are they evolving?  Slowly losing their fur?  Moving toward patches only on chest, four legpits, groin…

Or becoming aquatic?  Cats in black water under the moon…

They’re definitely healthy.  Are they happy?