when desire and compulsion focus on the same object it renders the evitable in.

My parents once owned a cat named Pomerantz, some time in the late sixties. I was reminded of this by a client walking in this morning and asking for someone with that name. The cat was mangy and had worms and died within three weeks of them rescuing him from the shelter. He was a large orange tabby. I’ve never actually seen pictures of him, but this is the way he was described to me. Or rather, I think this is the way he was described to me. It is possible that the name Pomerantz simply evoked in me the image of a large orange tabby cat. A childhood is a collage of pictures and stories and strange correlations, links that aren’t there, arrows drawn between this and that, conclusions arrived at and values established, a history constructed by way of accretion. Silty deposits, churned and stirred till solidified. Calcified walls easily pierced when tested for durability and a sound basis in fact. Did this person say that. Was this then. Did that happen. Was that really why. We had a striped orange couch, still now in my father’s apartment. It too looks like Pomerantz the cat, or rather he it. Alternating orange and tan, with fine persian green filigree.

i am growing increasingly intolerant of adverbs and adjectives. blue morning indeed. bah. the next person to use blue anything in a poem gets hit upside the head with um… tome 1 of the complete works of Jacques Cousteau. so beware.