By BRAD LEITHAUSER

Watch the poet read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:

“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. 

[Purchase Issue 28 here.]