Domino Watched For You

February 1, 2022 / animar64 / 4 Comments

RDP Tuesday: WATCHED

Domino 16 Weeks Old

When she was a puppy I watched her eyes shine

when she saw you, when she heard your voice,

when you reached down to pet her and reminded her she wasn’t a cat

like her big brother Wolfgang

whom she loved only second to you.

When she got older

and her health failed

she would sleep a lot and take short little walks

and happily wait for you to come home.

When she heard your car door slam and you whistled for her

she would get up and her eyes would shine.

And then Wolfie died and you went away

and that is when I think her heart really started to fail.

For a little while she would lift her head up when she heard a car door slam and she

would wait for your whistle

but of course it never came

and she would let her head fall back to her pillow and she would go back to sleep.

Her eyes, I remember, never really did shine after you left and my heart broke for her

and then part of it hardened.

Now when I think about Domino’s broken

heart and darkened eyes I think of you and my own heart doesn’t break.

It turns to stone.

Domino aged 14 years

When I Was 10 Years Old

January 28, 2022January 28, 2022 / animar64 / 2 Comments

RDP Friday: DITCH

Piet Mondriaan
Polder Landscape with Irrigation Ditch and Two Cows

The ditch ran down the road we lived on and it traveled for block after block after our street.

When it stormed out and the rain really came down hard the ditch would fill up and sometimes it spilled into the road and it pushed things out into the open for a little ways before the water crashed into a pipe where the roads intersected and it went underground.

Once I saw a dead cat – and it had been dead for quite awhile whoosh by me in that ditch. The cat was on it’s side and I will always remember it’s one cloudy filmy blue eye looking up at me. I resisted the urge to reach down and grab it out of the water, I think I wanted to save it from that dirty horrible grave but the sides of the ditch were slippery and I didn’t try.

Of all of the dead faces I have looked into- both human and animal, that one face is the one I see when I think of death and loss.

I still wonder what that poor cat’s name was.

I was 10 years old the year I saw that cat.

46 years later and I’m still here, that ditch is still there and I suppose you could argue

that cat is still here to

and so is the water.