After lunch, I bury the cat in a pretty spot near the back fence.
I pull debris from the dirt and rock-line the hole,
the light-as-air root ball wrapped in a striped shirt,
a precious antique–
for who wouldn’t say that 22 years was a long life?
The digging reveals the jaw bone of the dog buried there 10 years before.
I thought she was a foot to the right.
Sorry for the disruption I blurt,
and place a terracotta planter on the site
to keep the live neighborhood dogs and cats
and coyotes from digging them up.
My yard holds a subterranean dog, cat, hamster, guppy and two guinea pigs,
beloved companions of memory, fertile pets
like small toppled trees feeding bugs and worms and bacteria,
animal nurse logs bequeathing saplings, ferns, moss,
like asparagus waiting three years to bloom into an afterlife of giving.
I want to be in the garden,
buried in the world’s biggest shoe box
or enshrouded in a Wonder Woman bedsheet
or veiled in violets and leaves, lichen and spiderwebs.
Don’t preserve me like berries or pickle me like green beans.
Lower me gently or drop me whole in the clammy clay
on a rainy November day and cover me with rocky loam.
Stick bulbs in the ground to surprise passersby in the spring and the fall.
In summer, let the buttercups overrun me.
Someone will put a statue of a child or a rabbit on me
and I’ll find out what’s left beside bones and teeth:
this poem maybe
the moment I gave my daughter a foot massage and she was surprised
the grinning day I watched my children play on a sandbar off Cape Cod
the vague-now-vaguer feel of my mother stroking my hair and singing a Yiddish lullaby.
