Cat Drama Status Update, Friday Afternoon

The prompt at https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2023/04/friday-writings-74-act-of-paying.html was for writings about paying attention. One of the poems prompted focussed attention on urban despair, the kind of despair induced specifically and merely by being in a crowded, polluted environment for too long; you'll find it, if you click on the links in the link widget, but be warned that it's effective enough to be a painful read.

I started noodling with a poem about love and attention. It was meant to have irregular rime. I didn't pay much attention to rime, and the poem, or draft-of-poem, came out without much of it.

Attention is not quite the same as love

but they connect. They intersect. A child

is happy, in the sense of fortunate,

when all the little things that make it wail

are solved by a form bending form above

to offer food, dry pants, the airy kiss

that's just enough  to take away such pain

as the child knows. Attention to the child

is all it really wants, or needs, for then.

Later come pains that can't be kissed away

and only increase when attention's given.

Sooner or later all of us must come

to know ourselves our only comforters.

The baby teeth first stretch, then split, the gum.

The baby's told: "Stop fussing for attention."

Attention won't relieve the pain. Time will.

The baby learns: some things, no use to mention.

There's a recent, but honorable, tradition of posting unfinished poems on blogs and inviting readers to try finishing them. Although one poet who wrote some successful poems that way described the experience of writing them in terms of "being pebbled," I think I'll put this poem on readers' doorsteps and see if anyone feeds it.

My attention keeps drifting back to the glyphosate-poisoned kittens. The male might survive--unlikely, but possible. The younger female's going through what the hours-older female went through last night. I have to assume she's dead; but though she's not in a box, she's in a Schroedinger's Cat sort of situation at the moment, not dead, not alive. Cats "have nine lives" because they can feel stiff, cold, and dead when they're actually in a coma. I touched the kitten's back, trying to start the intimacy of cleaning a kitten with as little contact as possible, because she's had no chance to build up immunity to any virus or bacteria. Her back was stiff, this morning...but her paws and tail were floppy, and when I touched her again, preparatory to burying the body, the whole body was floppy and even showed some reflexes, though the urinary reflex had shut off. 

I buried a kitten that was in this condition once, during a glyphosate poisoning episode. The next day I went to work, and when I came in the kitten had climbed out of its shallow grave and crawled about fifty yards, back to its original (by then empty) nest, just to die there. 

I kept a kitten that was in this condition in the house once, during another glyphosate poisoning episode. Two litter mates responded to treatment with charcoal and lived--one for another month or so, the other for three years. The comatose kitten, however, showed only reflex movement for four days before the body started to exude a bacterial odor so foul I took it out and buried it, and at least that one stayed buried.

I don't dare hope that Serena's pretty princess kitten will live long enough to accept a name.

I don't want to bury her, yet, either.

Some might say that one thing this unfortunate kitten could be given was a humane, certain death. I've seen Serena smother doomed kittens under layers of paper or fabric, seen Heather snap their spines as if they were rats; cats do understand about euthanasia when kittens are in pain, and when the primary cause of death is glyphosate poisoning they're not tempted to eat the bodies. Maybe I'm a sentimental wimp. For now, I give this kitten attention.

There are a few known cases where cats emerged from comas like this and lived and were healthy. So far as I know those were all adult cats, or at least well grown kittens.