The slender tabby cat

A cup of tea this morning?

You choose the mug whose walls grow the hottest.

Staring at your reflection in the kitchen window

(at the way you stir and swirl

with the strongest blade of grass you could find

within five yards of your front door)

you'll consider your meeting with a slender tabby

in a few day's time.

And the tea, for ten years,

has yet to reinvent itself, though the blame

cannot be placed entirely on the tin imported from Shanghai.

A dog barks outside, and with the sound

(ringing, undoglike, down the alley where you first made love)

you wish for the time to be six o'clock

when, in the dimming autumn, 

you'll take the leaves from which you drank

and throw them into the smoke-driven wind.

And while the oments trickle as if crystallized in the following season,

you stare into your reflection, growing weaker with the light.

The sound of the lonely dog, howling now,

disappears into the morning rush hour din.

A quesion remains, hidden in the cupboard

behind dinnerware you dare not use,

for lugubrious manuscripts of infidelity

hide there in the gossamer.

And when the clock stares down at you, its face kindly,

from the white-ribbed wall--

when the morning sun glares through the glass,

through the clearing fog, unafraid of its permanent position

as the formidable giver--

when a spider crawls across and down your knee

to stare at a chipped toenail and sob at its imperfect composition--

a bough from the ancient tree outside crashes through the ceiling.

The spider saves the cobwebs--

you save the clock with the kind face, forgetting the tea.