Opals

—for Tamar Craig I knew the hard winter of sapphires set within gold claws, amber and pipestone strung on gut, fringed pouches stuffed with hash. Separate, separate, I urged her that summer of Woodstock, when I lied to get the car and draped my love beads around the neck of someone else’s sister. In a hayloft in Ohio my friend lifted three bales to show me a litter of week-old kittens, each pair of eyes infected with a slimy mucus. Their pupils swam in opaque opal membranes and they would have gone blind if she had not pulled an eyedropper of antibiotics from her jacket, doing what the mother cat could not do, what the owners would not trouble themselves to do, doing what a sister or friend might do if she took the time to attend the wayward, opalescent unhappiness in this world.