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Nutshell Kingdom: More Found Cougar Poetry ("krill"? "baleen of time"?)
2004
Puma or Cougar?
Do you prefer puma or cougar?
The preference is a telling one.
One calls a cougar a puma and awakens to find several tic-tac-toe games, all draws, clawed in one's chest.
On the other hand, one tells a puma it is a cougar, and thereafter frequently answers the phone only to hear heavy breathing, or feels the hot breath rank with putrid meat on the back of one's neck in Mickey Rourke movies.
There are no right or wrong answers.
Only an acceptance of the consequences.
Myself, I prefer the puma.
Pee-yoooooooo-maaaaa.
That is how they pronounce it.
Making three long syllables, where most would be content with two quick ones.
A flourish, a gesture of supreme confidence, as though the extra effort were inconsequential; the time taken, a triviality.
They are content to pursue their prey with apparently indolent insouciance for months, years, even lifetimes.
I once knew a man who called a puma a cougar. The creature stared bloodless death into the man's soul and let him run. The man ran for the rest of his life, certain that he heard the soft rapid pads of the puma echoing his own footfalls. But the puma was waiting. He only appeared at the man's death, smiling incuriously. Born into the next life full of the knowledge of his pursuer, the man began to run again, and ran for two hundred years.
Puma and man.
Lion and gazelle.
Bear and salmon.
Antibody and virus.
Driver and pedestrian.
Critic and artist.
Always, at the last moment, allowed to escape into a new life. Until one day, the man was born with the certainty that the pursuit had ended. Relief flooded his soul, and, turning his frenzy in new directions, he became acquisitive, and grew rich and soft. One day the puma, reincarnated as a tax auditor, arrived grinning on his doorstep. The man died sick and cold, in a dark lonely place, his fortune gone. The puma smacked his lips as he feasted on the rich, sweet satisfaction of his vengeance, which he gulped down raw and steaming.
But, he forgot that his human gut could not digest so much raw meat. And he died, weeping at the knotted agony of his entrails. He was buried beside the man. And both were then consumed, finally, dispassionately, by the earth. Like krill, sieved through the baleen of time.
As I said, I prefer puma.
But I prefer still more to leave them be, and to have the favor returned.
