“Happy and furry?” she inquires,
of the TV—
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three,
as she is, with creeping dementia—all
sorts of imponderables float by,
and everything the more inscrutable
if other faculties are failing too…
like hearing, perhaps. A few seconds later,
though, we enjoy a breakthrough,
as our breezy, blow-dried commentator
re-airs his catchphrase, which I move to clarify
by relaying it slowly:
“Happy. And. Free.”
… At day’s end, even so, I might prefer
happy and furry, as though she
might yet retrieve days when all of us were
that peculiar entity, a big family—
father, mother, four boys of various
ages and stages—become, like any true family,
inhabitants of a lair,
wound and bound in a low common smell
(our own must of sweat and hair),
that familial furriness which cordons off a small
walled area while informing a potentially
invasive world, This is us.
Happy and furry. The woman’s five years dead,
yet just last week the phrase returned
as I, watching a YouTube clip, was shepherded
to an obscure nature site by a tag that posed
a teasing test: TRY NOT TO CRY AS MAMA CHIMP
MOURNS BABY. The test? Frankly, I’m not sure I passed.
Embarrassed, as if being watched, I felt
my eyes prickle as the blinking simian—so loving,
so darkly puzzled—stroked and stroked the silky pelt
of a torso strangely limp
whose russet fire still burned,
though warming neither the dead nor the living.
… Furry, then, if not free. We mishear,
misread, we go on misspeaking,
and if our errors pain us, soon they disappear
into an unseen, unseeable, ever-amassing crowd.
Click here. Click. Now. Always, the furious din out there,
and what do our answers count, everything so loud
and larger always than yesterday? We learn to chart
our growth by the billion-, trillion-fold:
Vaster, faster numbers. See me. Click. Give me your heart,
click. Like me…. So many voices, all seeking,
as I suppose both mothers were, the warm, the old,
the furred primordial lair.
Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poetry, will be published by Knopf in February 2025. A former theater critic for Time, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
