Sore Throat

Sick in bed with a sore throat, I can’t get out of my mind the image of the cat harpsichord from the eighteenth century, soothing a prince with laughter. It worked like this: the tails of them attached to the strings of the instrument were pulled by different notes, and the difference between the way the cats cried was music. A shadow is only a shape. Which is why certain individuals can put their hands in light and make them birds, can say in shadow what they can’t in light. The tiny branches of the hedge in the yard that separates my house from the next look like the rib bones of a bird when the sun hits lunch. The world, they say, is best for a nest but no good for a flying place. Come back, I say to my dead, and the branches don’t even graze the window, when I eat it hurts.