After a bout
of pneumonia,
he was searching
for something different.
It was rainy season;
a plague
of mosquitoes
had descended.
Eating ramen noodles
and fried eggs,
he’d acquired
a drug-addicted look.
Stung by fire ants
again and again,
wearing the moldy clothes
a little monkey
had peed on,
and grasping a machete
to cut through brush,
he let the frayed leash,
cinched at his wrist
to 250 pounds
of apex predator,
go where it wanted
(except down where refugees
had planted soybeans
and sunflowers),
his torso never
far from the cat’s
as he took the same
steps it did,
its solemn eyes
turning around intermittently
to illuminate the forest,
like chandeliers.
Some men are afraid
of soldiers, some of their telephone
wires being tapped. Because
he had a secret,
he was afraid.
Birth, sex, sickness, death:
he was finished with them,
he thought, so one day
he disappeared into
complete silence
somewhere off the grid,
walking a big cat,
whose testes dangled
like a man’s.
Still, the demands
of his secret were too great,
something not him still in him,
tethering him to a past,
which burned implacably
with the force of the sun.