When springtime brought snowmelt and storms and forecasted floods.

And the salesmen refused to return my frantic calls about flood

Insurance, i threw caution to the April winds and my cat into the river

In my dream and my dreamed-cat swam, caught fish in the rising river,

And ate forever, sleek, fat, and mackerel happy.

It was I, in truth, who was unhappy.

If floods be told as a truth of what matters most,

My cat could fend for herself in most matters

Whether or not she could swim. Her survival drive

Would have propelled her to dry higher ground well before mine

Had woken to any work of emergency leaving.

I wanted what mattered to me most to be believing

That i had something to lose and to lose that,

That belief. Life is the art of leaving all that

We love and what we hate without attaching

To our desire to keep things. Life is flux. But at each thin

Peak between birth and dying, frail weaklings,

How hard we clutch, how fast we cling.