Woody

Abstract

There is no way of exaggerating how much love I feel for Woody. There is no accounting for it either. It is physical and moral, secret, natural, possessive. It has a smell and scorns poetry. It wants  to declare itself. I feel it when I leave him alone overnight and worry whether he has enough to eat, or wonder whether he has pulled apart the wire mesh I used to repair his cage, squeezed out between the bars, and jumped off to the floor, and is now huddled croaking in the dark on the handle of a wicker basket we keep in a lonely corner of the hall. I feel it when he crawls up my leg from the living room rug, while I'm reading on the couch, and puts his head under my forefinger for a scratch, or when I'm simply watching him watching me, grinning expectantly from his wooden ring that hangs in front of the kitchen picture window.


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