Higher Love

At the emergency animal clinic, I’m standing

in the bathroom thinking the crying room—

big and softly lit, a plant in a corner, the walls

airbrushed in grays and browns. The only place

in the building you can be alone. I remember

meeting a woman one night in this clinic waiting

for her Collie, injury treated, disaster over,

big bill paid. She told me she’d lost count

of how many times she’d been there over the years.

This is the first one I’ve brought home alive.

It’s the 4th of July weekend and hell’s broken loose

out there, the stories I heard in the lobby—bitten

by another dog, hit by a car, ate a box of candy,

foaming at the mouth from some new med.

My own cat 16 years old and stricken down

so suddenly that all he could do was lie

like a fallen tree and watch me through the vents

in the carrier all during the half-hour drive.

The stay is two days, the bill two pages long,

and now I’m standing here in the bathroom thinking

of people crying, though they say I can bring him

home tomorrow, just one more night of fluids

under the futuristic hoses and wires and dark-faced

monitors, his orange body blanketed in a warm balloon

of air while the vet tech types numbers on a pad,

a distant dog shrieking, a sound I can still hear,

that carries through God knows how many walls.

I wash my hands and push through the door

into the lobby and hold it open because a woman

is running toward me, her face swollen as a bee sting,

wet, her shoulders convulsing, a sound drowning

in her mouth. She rushes past, and I don’t dare

look, but I can see everyone—the lobby full, couples

and singles and families, some waiting with a dog

or a cat, some sitting alone with their phones and Cokes

from the machine, maybe fifteen people, every one

looking at her, and—reader, you have to see this—

every one with a face full of love and complete

recognition. No judgment, irony, glad-it’s-not-me,

a whole room of understanding while she pulls

the door shut and latches it to cry for the baby

that I now see—I remember this man from earlier,

how she sat with him in the waiting room when I did—

and in his arms he carries a small body, terrier-size,

wrapped tight in a blue blanket head to foot,

motionless as he bears it through the front door

into the parking lot. I follow him out,

but I can’t see anymore—how gently he lays it

on the back seat, I’m guessing—because I’m

getting in my own car, eyes down, letting him

have his peace alone. To intrude, to help—

it just isn’t done, or I don’t know how, and neither

did anyone back there, though we all know exactly

how high that love goes, most of us with no kids

or ones that are grown, most of us lying in bed at night

with a dog or cat snoring softly in the half-light,

the not quite deep-death night but the still-living kind

that makes us want to stay awake an hour longer,

the air outside alive with tires on the road and those crickets

that only started up a week ago and now sound like

they’ll keep singing that aria forever, even when

we all know sooner or later it will have to end.

 

Amy Miller, Rattle #67 Spring 2020