My work as a poet and writer has occasionally been accused of trying to find some elusive, perhaps illusive, commonality between the lowest denominators of human life and the grim objects of our material lives. What essence does a man share with his coffee cup, his clock, or for that matter his pen? What does a woman share with her hairbrush, with the fog beyond the window, or the buttons of her husband’s shirts?

I maintain that everything participates in Being with us, and that we see ourselves in the furniture more readily than in the future. No poem of recent memory embodies this concept better than this spare and lovely piece about a cat which is not a cat, and neither is human nor is not.