Have You Seen This Cat? Poem by John Courtney

A delicate and tired stray
slept beside the clock and
where old wonders were smothered
new tracks revealed themselves,
loosening the voice of man. Here
I ran naked, storm-like, and through
a television field picking smiles
from old movies. In centuries I
came to accept the bare child of
a mostly distant soul, the house
of night wrapped around us both,
but there in the monitor dark was
born to hunt the remaining light
for us all remaining tenants.

My friend, I wrote to you from
the center of my life not to find
God or ask for purpose in my dreams,
these dusty roadside words are
pasted clumsily from the fingers
of branches and maybe are still
hungry in the traffic of love.
Perhaps I thought I could recognize
my own voice given the chance to
read it again on your earth. If
I'm honest (and I was) , I would
be more pleased to find
my deadest cat, Willy,
than your God.