Though I try not to look at it, I know the brown-white lump
on the road is a struck cat who will never go home.
How it clumps against the asphalt like thrown-away clothes.
It makes me need desperately to see my own living cat
when I open the door to my house. She turns away
as if uninterested but shaking her long-furred tail,
which I’ve been taught understand as approval
if not love proper. I choose to translate it as love
which is of course projection. Cats have been known to eat
the recently deceased bodies of their owners. I don't
hold this possibility against her, my cat who sleeps
on my lap only if there's a box between us. She maintains
her boundaries. And what's to say that isn't a love,
leaving even your body behind as one's inheritance?