Kermit

The first injection merely rolled your eyes
back. Paws flattened, those meaty badger forearms
that clawed landscapes on the legs of one hissing fool
sank gentler, lids fell.

Toes were never safe. Stuffed, propped, dozing
to a baking lampshade
and a double quartz heartbeat,
our eyes would flutter, fatally miss
the fluid black ear triangle coasting
whiskers off the bedspread.
A twitch from ambush,
we'd learn to check our dreamings.

You'd perch tableside, bibbed to blithely
crunch husk after vacated crayfish carcass,
lackadaisically jab balloons from existence,
sprawl to stab ankles in sudden eruptions,
while those flattened ears cradled an engine
overdimensioned for this tiny flat.
You needed the musty pollen haze of a rat-strewn vastness,
ruts to bound from black pool to stubble
and a blinking, blindsided field mouse hockey puck.
In this city box you were capped, boiling,
and the fever spattered time and again
as our friends were turned to quarry.

By the time the second needle split you
to end that raging muscle's churn,
your ears had swiveled to greet the dawn squeak
and scurry of tiny shadow creatures, scrabbling in the dust
just beyond the barn door.

Dec. 9, '00

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