Magnum Opus

My girlfriend is not a poet in the way that most people mean. She is a collector of rare and valuable information. Today, she told me about cats & the color of their coats. We adopted a kitten recently, a baby thing with elastic legs and a penchant for biting paper. She is the color of placing a screw in the drywall to hang up a favorite painting, likely some print of Vermeer or Matisse, in the wall of my old apartment and then tearing out the screw in my haste to keep moving. My girlfriend told me that our kitten would not be the color of drywall forever. Her coat is cold activated, she said, an abstract form of albinism. The coldest parts of her body, ones closest to the grave, will get darker. The kitten will develop brown gloves on her hands and feet, a little tuft on the tail, as if that would help hide the dirt. One foot in the grave and all that. I found that bit of information endearing at first, the brown gloves, because I, too, wear socks at all times in the house. My girlfriend said that when she gets old, the cat I mean, her circulation fails and her now warm blood becomes cool blood becomes slow blood and the cat will be extremely brown. Here I was, thinking that when warm blood becomes cool blood becomes slow blood she would be dead. I do not envy her, my girlfriend I mean, how sweet it must have tasted, the apple. How rich at first it must seem. Until one day you realize that each new brown fiber, each new high-effort hair, isn’t brown like an acorn, or perhaps an open gate, but rather brown like an apple seed, brown like the required 199 apple seeds that need to be ingested before a human being dies from cyanide poisoning (per my girlfriend.) I am a poet, my girlfriend is a collector of knowledge, Death is a modern artist whose brush stroke falls in earthen tones on the coat of a kitten. No doubt his magnum opus.