The Cat Who Unstitched Herself From the Moon

She comes back through the wall
the way smoke comes back through a chimney,
wrong direction, patient, her body a rumor the dark keeps repeating.

I call her name, and the name
falls through her like rain through a sieve of light.
She was never listening to names.
She was listening to the hinge of the door
that would not, some nights, agree to be a door.

Nine lives, they said, as if grief
could be rationed like bread.
I have buried her nine times in nine different Aprils
and every April, the ground
gives her back a little wrong,
too thin, too silver, stitched from moth-wing and static,
a shape the size of absence.

She sits now where the sunlight used to pool
on the kitchen floor, though there is no sun.

Still, the floor has forgotten how to hold weight.
Her shadow arrives before she does,
spills across the threshold like ink from a jar no one remembers tipping.

I have stopped trying to touch her.
My hand goes through the place where warmth
used to keep an animal-shaped hour of the day.

Somewhere, I think, there is a version of this house
where she still knocks the glass from the table
just to hear it break,
just to make me look up.
In that house, it is always the exact
wrong hour of dusk, the cat is always
about to come home, and I am always
almost remembering her name.