American Life in Poetry: ‘Lily’ by Ron Koertge

We’ve been selecting poems for this column for more than 10 years and I can’t remember ever publishing a poem about a cat. But here at last is a cat, a lovely old cat. Ron Koertge lives in California, and his most recent book of poems is “Vampire Planet: New & Selected Poems,” from Red Hen Press.

Lily

No one would take her when Ruth passed.

As the survivors assessed some antiques,

I kept hearing, “She’s old. Somebody

should put her down.”

I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her

about the fish who died for her, the ones

in the cheerful aluminum cans.

She lies on my chest to sleep, rising

and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat

fastened to a battered dock by a string.

Poem copyright 2016 by Ron Koertge, from “Vampire Planet: New & Selected Poems” (Red Hen Press, 2016) and reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by The Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.