The Kitten (poem)

The kitten died today.

Or maybe it was yesterday. It’s sometimes hard to tell the time of death of kittens. 

The dogs were staring at it. Noses pointed intensely, motionless, silent. It seemed more like they were gesturing toward it than dreaming of its flavor. 

They were pointing, as if to say, “It’s over there. Consider it.”

Walking by, I saw the kitten contorted in weird ways, its head smashed into the road. 

Este es la vida.

This came hardly an hour after the I Ching told me, “Any limitation you would impose on another must first be accepted and practiced by yourself. Be gentle, innocent, and truthful in all things now.”

The day was hot in the mountain village of southern Mexico. I walked the long route to the art center. 

At the center was a photography exhibition about salt miners. In the giant pictures hanging from the ceiling, it looked like the ragged men were shoveling snow barefoot. 

Above the museum, on the terrace, what looked like a giant wood-burning stove with two smokestacks was filled with the corpses of colonies of wasps, their paper nests resting in shreds all around their bodies. I think the sign said that the stove was originally used by artisans in the fabrication of paper, but my Spanish is not so good.

Berenicia invited me to the discussion of the students‘ work tonight, which is at seven, and which promises to be lively.  

Walking home as the sun went down, I stopped in the cemetery, which sits on top of a hill and looked at the dates on the graves. Most of the monuments were done in metal as opposed to the stonework I’m more familiar with back home.

I’m in a foreign country where my knowledge of the language is not so good. Yet most of the significant things about a place have very little to do with the spoken word. I wonder what the students will discuss tonight. I wonder if I will choose to go even though I won’t understand anything that will be said.    

Maybe I will understand. I suspect tone and presence speaks most of a sentence for an orator. I will not require anyone to say or to speak anything in particular. Only the smell of the fires in the valley and the donkey shit in the road. Only the color of the blood on the kitten’s face and the cracked toes of miners staring stark against the brilliance of the salt and the dusty decay of the wasps, which may or may not be part of an exhibition. I will require only their reasons for making things, which no matter how much they will argue to the contrary, are never a product of the mind. 

A shadow is cast by the tallest mountain that holds in the horizon and the tiny walkway that disappears up its side. Some people say hello to the stranger with a smile while others look away and the metal name tags on the graves in the cemetery slowly get older and slightly less legible. 

By the time I made it back home, somebody had moved the body of the kitten, so I assume it probably died today.    

12/06/2012 6:20 PM

Rocio’s House

San Augustin de Etla

Oaxaca, Mexico