Look

I’d like to ask my mother
why I’m here, straddling
one thigh of her bell-bottom jeans,
listening to her whisper look
look sweetie in my ear.
But I can’t stop staring
at our fat cat Walina,
ancestor of every cat
that ever roamed that house,
as she blinks back at me,
licks between her claws,
then turns again to eating
the clear, vein-laced skin
stretched over the faces
of her babies squirming
in a pulled-out dresser drawer.
I’d like to ask—but this is back
before anything means anything, when it all just is,
and even the squinting kittens
are like a game my mother made up
to pass the drizzly afternoon.
Back in the cold, dark evening
of childhood, where I’m always
alone: watching Walina
close her mouth around the runt—
the sleepy one, the one too weak
to butt its head against her,
that meows and meows
though no sound comes out,
when she drops it outside the drawer.
This is in the oldest room
of the house behind my eyelids,
where the world began:
where a light bulb pops and flickers
over everything, and no one
ever comes to stop the kitten
from dragging its sack of blood
all over the white linoleum.

Patrick Phillips
Look first appeared on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, November 23, 2006.