By Dan Carpenter
I am fresh from an online debate with bookish
friends about one of America’s most celebrated living poets when death comes to
a family member who shares the poet’s name by sheer coincidence and shares a
trademark quality of her favorite subject matter: Non-humanity.
No sooner do I vent my weariness with Mary
Oliver’s incessant animal poems than Oliver dies on me; and I must try, against
all hope of achieving poetry, to write him a decent eulogy. He earned it; he
gave a pet’s perfection in his six willful and sporadically violent years, and
he may have lasted his full feline half score and five had it not been for my
lassitude, my complacency, my wishful thinking that his profound lethargy and pitiable
crying of the last day was just one more occasion for a tough little guy to
barf out his troubles and trot on. Probably poisoned by some plant or refuse he
ingested, the vet surmised. Who knows? Who springs for a $100 autopsy for a
cat, especially if it might yield an indictment that he could have been saved?
He died all alone against a chain link fence
on a sublime Sunday afternoon, abandoned by the man who fed him, held doors
open for him, provided feet around which he curled and gave ounces, if not
pints, of blood to his playfulness of tooth and claw. My grief is commensurate
with his innocence. My anger and anguish and remorse befit the death of a
child. I’ve never questioned the instructive beauty of Mary’s dogs and bears;
only their redundancy. She numbed me to the pain of the single speck of the
wealth of fauna, lost and lodged in the eyelid and the heart.
Ollie was a ghetto boy, gray even to his
whiskers, rescued from a cardboard box of newborns outside an abandoned house
by my son. His namesake is a fellow orphan, Oliver Twist. My small
comfort: Ollie’s life may have ended in days had it not been for Pat’s
intervention, the whim that brought him to our house, the place whereto all
complications converge. He grew from puffball to lean loping miniature panther
in that domain, somehow keeping his infant voice, that comic and ultimately
pathetic squeak that I heard over and over on his final day and will hear for
the length of memory. A cry for help, missed by a lifelong journalist who prides
himself on the rare skill of listening.
Such a mousy voice and sometimes, such a mean
little bastard. Those bug eyes would dilate to full round black and he would
leap and rip flesh. The lady of the house – also a Mary, it is – would scream
for me to seize him and toss him into the outdoors. And yet . . . Yet there’s a
feline sensitivity to the environment and its human component that compelled
him, when she was convalescing in lonely despondency from a stroke, to post
himself at her side and on her lap for hours at a stretch. We choose to
believe, anyway, that such were the workings inside his tiny skull.
I labored to exhaustion digging a grave
behind the garage, in an overgrown border patch where Oliver was wont to hang
out on his pretend-predator forays. The ground was stubborn, ribbed with tree
roots, yielding up a brick, a bottle cap, a scrap of black garbage bag. I
remember a funeral back here three decades ago, when a toddler joined me in
saying goodbye to a goldfish named Simon. A tender, made-for-vignette moment,
which I duly conveyed in my newspaper column. A light life given for
lightweight literature.
Now, the stiff, staring corpse of a family
member we all mourn goes into the hole with hard effort, and he and I and my
wife make this passage alone. I pull the rocky dirt and dry leaves over my
final view of my beloved Ollie, half-wrapped in a ludicrous iridescent green
grocery bag, and I slap a broken piece of concrete steppingstone atop lest I
forget where the earth reclaimed him, and I kiss my fingers and touch the
filthy surface, grateful for the milky sky that will wash his rough bed a few hours
hence, trying to be grateful the world has greater miseries than this one that
tears at me right now.
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Dan Carpenter is a freelance writer and
former newspaper columnist who lives in Indianapolis. His poems and stories
have appeared in Flying Island, Fiction, Poetry East, Pearl, Laurel Review and other journals. He is
the author of Indiana Out Loud: Dan
Carpenter on the Heartland Beat (Indiana Historical Society Press).