In the hospital corridor I smell something
I don't like -- a sharp scientific tang,
full of isotopes and control -- beneath it
sour body-stuff, wastes, sweats.
It puts me off my food. It scares me to death.
I think of my cat, who's eighteen and deaf
and, recently, blind: she gets by on smells,
her nose an outthrust, anxious sentinel
as she bumps among the once-familiar furniture.
Stiff-legged, punch-drunk, howling, confounded by corners,
she makes it to her bowl of reeky fish.
Hard to imagine her loving such a stench,
or to realize that the stench is all she has --
and all that means.