Carrie Etter

Vigil

'Is that the cat at the door, or the wind? Or the wind's cats?'
                                                 David Morley, 'A Lit Circle'

I know the wind's cats:
some made ghosts by death; others by devotion –

deathbed loiterer, its steady gaze
in periphery's commotion

until the eyes fall; the body quakes
in its last vast gasp,

then taken far and forever –
and a pet's not a pet for days

but another of the wind's cats.

Carrie Etter's fourth collection, The Weather in Normal, will be published by Seren Books and in the US by Station Hill Press this autumn.