Katherine Bogden
	A Glimpse of You at the Dog Park After Two Years of Absence Like the distant sound of your name called on the street you can just hear, but then, turning, aren't sure you heard at all, the second of hesitation before the matador pulls the muleta and the bull runs by — like picking up the phone to call Bill and remembering he's dead;      It is the moment after the moment you realize you're speeding but the deer is already stepping into the road. When the Cat is Away We speak about God.  Life, you explain, is purely physical and God is love—a complicated chemical reaction.  I laugh at your idealism, and you say, Why? What is life to you, what makes us more than this, gesturing at the unmade bed and paper-filled coffee table. I tell you life is not just primitive instinct but abstract thought and God is acceptance, is releasing yourself from yourself; believing in the feeling of a tree's bark—its linear coarseness. It is not questioning the physicality in the sound of the garbage truck pulling away—part of your life inside. Isn't that love? You want to know—isn't love a feeling that passes through the body like sunlight through glass, emerging elsewhere unchanged? You speak with confidence in your knowledge, as if you have climbed Kilimanjaro and at the top, found in the melting glacier, a note from some almighty Buddha crumpled inside and suddenly you know the truth in the divine nature of the pine cone, the East River the cobble-stone street. You know that at the end of the world, our consciousness will cease and the something       that is  beyond our comprehension will go on without us. And what will be lost? If you could return home with me, see my cat sitting in the window, watching the pigeons cooing then silently lifting off the sill; if you could lay here, beside me, feel the weight of her on your chest, the lifting and falling, bringing a sudden consciousness of your breath; you will realize it is not love that keeps you still, waiting for her to rise, long after you needed to use the bathroom, but the recognition that her body contains all the answers to the world. I imagine you, in this moment—shocked that somehow you never noticed God sleeping in the window; or casually stretching across the floor.