The Cats

Ghost was his first.

He found Ghost at the Springfield Animal Control facility on a rainy Wednesday in April 2020, which was a particular kind of Wednesday in a particular kind of year that most people who lived through it have not forgotten. He had been thinking about getting a cat for months — not in a decisive way, just in the background of his thinking, the way certain ideas that are going to become decisions will circulate in the background until they surface as choices.

He drove to the facility without a plan. He walked the kennels with the specific diffidence of a person who is committed to making an informed choice and will therefore be undone by the first animal that makes a bid for their attention.

Ghost did not make a bid. Ghost walked over with the straightforward intention of a large animal who has assessed the available options and made a selection. He sat on Vincent’s feet.

He looked up at him with the expression of someone who has concluded that the interview is over and the decision has been made and could they please proceed.

Vincent filled out the paperwork.

He carried Ghost out in a borrowed carrier, Ghost howling in the specific register of an animal who finds the carrier philosophically objectionable. He drove home. He opened the carrier in the apartment. Ghost walked out, inspected each room with the methodical attention of a property manager doing an assessment, and then went to the windowsill and sat down and began watching the street below.

He has been watching the street ever since.

* * *

Omen came six months later.

He appeared at the facility with no history on file — found as a stray, approximate age one year, black, small, in good health considering. Vincent had not been planning to get a second cat. He had gone to the facility to drop off a donation — food, supplies, the kind of practical gesture that a person who has a cat and

therefore understands what cats require tends to make.

He walked past the kittens room. He walked past the adult cat room. He stopped at a cage near the end of the row where a small black cat was sitting with his paws folded and his eyes fully open and his attention fully deployed on Vincent in a way that was less like an animal asking to be chosen and more like an animal informing you that you have an appointment.

Vincent looked at him.

Omen looked at him.

Something was communicated that neither of them had words for.

He filled out the paperwork.

He drove home with Omen in the carrier — Omen, silent and contained, riding with his paws folded and his eyes open, regarding the passing highway with the expression of someone who has accepted the terms of this arrangement and intends to get on with things.

* * *

The cats have been with him through the worst of the last three years.

Ghost: warm and heavy and present. The specific weight of a fifteen-pound cat pressed

against the side of a human in the chair at 4 AM is not a small thing. It is grounding in the specific physical sense of the word — it connects the body to the surface of the world. It says: you are here, you are in this chair, you are in this room, the room is real, the chair is real, the cat is real, you are real.

Omen: watching. The quality of his attention is its own kind of company. He does not demand interaction. He does not perform affection on a schedule. He is simply present in the room with his eyes open and his full attention deployed, and being in the presence of that quality of attention is steadying in ways that Vincent has thought about and cannot fully explain.

He has read that animals are used in therapeutic contexts for exactly this reason — the regulation they provide, the grounding, the embodied presence that does not require anything from you except that you be in the same room. He does not need to medicalize it. He knows what it does for him. He is grateful for it.

He feeds them every morning. He feeds them every evening. This is the rhythm. The cats and the desk and the notebook and the coffee and the pen, the daily rhythm that holds the

days together when the days might otherwise come apart.

Small things. He has always been held by small things. He is learning — slowly, imperfectly, with frequent backsliding — to call this grace.

* * *

Ghost gets sick in October.

Not seriously — the vet says it is routine, something that older cats get, something manageable with a change in food and a twice- weekly supplement. But the visit to the vet is the first extended time Vincent has spent outside the apartment for anything other than grocery runs and walks in weeks, and it is disorienting in the specific way that leaving the controlled environment of the apartment is always slightly disorienting.

He carries Ghost in the carrier. Ghost howls with the particular indignation of a large animal who finds the carrier philosophically objectionable and wants everyone in the vicinity to know this.

Vincent sits in the vet’s waiting room with the howling carrier in his lap and reads a magazine from 2022 about home renovation and

does the breathing — in for four, hold for four, out for six — because waiting rooms have a specific quality that his nervous system does not enjoy.

The vet is efficient and kind. She examines Ghost with the practiced attention of someone who has been reading cats for years. She explains the issue. She explains the treatment. Ghost regards her with the dignified resignation of someone who has determined that this is going to happen regardless of their opinion.

They drive home. Ghost is silent on the way back, which is unusual. Vincent watches him in the carrier on the passenger seat.

Ghost looks back.

They are both tired.

He carries Ghost upstairs. He gives him the new food. He sits on the floor of the apartment with his back against the couch and Ghost in his lap.

Omen comes and sits nearby.

He sits on the floor with the cats for a long time.

He does not write anything.

Sometimes sitting is the practice.

* * *

He reads the poets he loves the way a student reads — for technique, for influence, for the things they can teach him that he cannot teach himself.

His list is long and specific and has changed over the years as his own work has developed and his sense of what he is trying to do has clarified. He reads O’Hara for permission — for the license to be direct, to name the immediate experience without dressing it up. He reads Lucille Clifton for precision and courage, the way she writes about the body with a kind of clarity that does not flinch. He reads Tracy K. Smith for architecture, the way she builds a poem from the inside out so that the form emerges from the content rather than being imposed on it.

He reads dead poets and living ones. He reads poets from other traditions, other languages — in translation, which is its own kind of reading, the experience of knowing you are one step removed from the original and finding value in that remove because what remains after translation is what is most essential.

He reads everything.

He writes in the margins.

He argues with the poets he loves because that is how you learn from them — not by agreeing with them but by finding the places where your instinct diverges and interrogating the divergence.

He is in a conversation with all of them, living and dead. The conversation is the tradition. He is part of the tradition now, even at twenty-six, even at twelve collections, even at the beginning of what he intends to be a long career.

He has been in the conversation since he was fifteen on the floor in Holyoke.

He will be in it until the end.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The practical meaning is this: time. Publishing costs writing time. He knows this. He has made his peace with it. The peace is imperfect. He will always prefer the page to the process. But the process is part of it. He does it anyway.

The pen comes up.

The page receives it.

He stops and reads what he has.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. This is not revision. This is the question before revision: is it honest? Is it saying the true thing? He reads it again. Outside the window the day is changing. The light on the desk is different. He is aware of his body — the shoulders, the neck, the hours in the chair. He stands. Moves. Returns. Ghost has not moved from the couch. Vincent looks at the desk. At the notebook. At the card. The work outlasts the pain that produced it. He knows this. He always comes back to this. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

His hand finds the pen.

He continues.

He writes. He always writes.