American Life in Poetry: Column 089

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for  
positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson of 
Connecticut shows us how to mourn inevitable changes,  
tuck the memories away, then go on to see the  
possibility of a new and promising chapter in one's life.

No Children, No Pets

I bring the cat's body home from the vet's
in a running-shoe box held shut
with elastic bands. Then I clean
the corners where she has eaten and
slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food
from the baseboard, dumping the litter
and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic
dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-
soaked towel I put in the trash. I put
the catnip mouse in the box and I put
the box away, too, in a deep
dirt drawer in the earth.

When the death-energy leaves me,
I go to the room where my daughter slept
in nursery school, grammar school, high school,
I lie on her milky bedspread and think
of the day I left her at college, how nothing
could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax
out from between her floorboards,
or taking a razor blade to the decal
that said to the firemen, "Break
this window first." I close my eyes now
and enter a place that's clearly
expecting me, swaddled in loss
and then losing that, too, as I move
from room to bone-white room
in the house of the rest of my life.

Reprinted from "Nimrod International Journal: 
The Healing Arts," Vol. 49, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 2006, 
by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2006
by Sue Ellen Thompson, whose latest book is
"The Golden Hour,"  Autumn House Press, 2006. 
This weekly column is supported  by The Poetry
Foundation, The Library of Congress, and  
the Department of English at the University of 
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited 
poetry.

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