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?

The journey of decades always comes back to this little garden.  Three sons, they grow, move out, the grandkids…and each year, around this time, the Spring fully commits and he can venture out, sniff the air, and get his hands in the dirt.

The sun was setting each day slightly further to the right, until it reached the gray steeple, and sure enough the first snowdrops emerged.

The soil is still slightly cold. The interconnected roots welcome him back, sense his health, loop him in. 

He is part of the Spring.  Part of this angle of sun and length of day.  Generations of local birds have flown and hopped around him.

His wife watches from time to time, standing in the window…

Even she doesn’t know that, for a select few, soil can nourish the body, undo things like neuropathy, turn back time.

Kneeling on the ground, his neck growing red, he is the membrane between Spring and soil.  The sun, the water, the upward growth, pass through him.

The garden is renewed in a pulse of light.

And now for months it will be:  Dad’s outside.  Grandpa’s with his flowers.  Can you smell the flowers on Grandpa?

*

Lucky man, to live in the smell of hyacinth and woodbine.  To have grass-stained knees again.  But there’s more.  The garden extends:

Six months ago, the seed catalogues started arriving.  In March, he took virtual classes and surfed the chatrooms.  Then it was regular visits to the nursery—that goldmine.

Now, like clockwork, his schedule’s changing, and so is his wife’s.

“I don’t feel like TV.  Let’s sit outside.”

“It’s warm enough.  Let’s eat outside.”

To be near the garden.