You needn’t leave. Sit
by the fire.
Did I say “leave,”
or “live”? Let’s leave it at “leave.” Stay
seated, rock a little, if
you’re in your grandmother’s rocking
chair that’s left her house, that’s now
in yours. And wait. There may come
a cat, clothed in the guise of a memory,
beyond its imperfections,
cloaked in a thought or a whisper,
offered to you as you sit there,
left to you as slippers
uncomfortable, still warm.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Mantis, Two Hawks Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Panoply, and Aji. He has raced whippets in the Midwest and is part of that stubborn undercurrent in Brooklyn that continues to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers