Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually,
without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer. -Rilke

There was always that question,
a bonfire in my youth.
Heat so intense it melted red-hot flames
and resurrected ice-cold blue.
It teased my head and my heart
with hollow promises
and the vanity of self-immolation.
It seduced me in between the velvet lines
of a throaty love song.
Sometimes I heard it in the fine-tuned scream
of a hungry hawk
or in the echo of monastic silence.
It stalked me like the shadow of a predator.
It taunted me in the repertoire of a mockingbird,
and I wondered what it was all about.

Until I saw that cat.
The stroke of tan and seal brown silk.
The high-priced pure breed who scorned his ilk
to become a seasoned hero of the basement
labyrinth.

That cat gleefully licked his whiskers after each kill
as I stood and watched, burning in hell. Recanting.
Admiring his skill with religious devotion
as I surrendered to the notion that it was always,
always all about
mice.

Elaine Morgan
Warrenton, VA