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?