I did not see the cat leap

The rational faculty of understanding does not bring peace, I realize, as I drive into the garage at home.

Instead, peace arrives in a moment of sensory awareness and presence.

Seeing the car, the cat has come to greet me

He sits on the brick wall, beneath the flushed cotoneaster berries,

Regarding me through the closed driver’s window

In the blurred brightness of an overcast day his intelligent pupils are slits.

He will jump, I think, idly watching him.

While still absorbing the taped words of Eckhart Tolle, I notice how my mind wanders to these other thoughts

Wanders to a close observation of the cat as he prepares to leap.

I watch him launch himself,see his furred underbelly fly by, hear the thump as he lands on the car roof.

I smile to see his exploratory paw come down over the windshield, slip slightly in the wetness left by recent rain, withdraw again.

I have watched him, placing his paws precisely to tightrope walk along the open window’s ledge,

Balancing carefully around the obstacle that is the car’s side mirror.

Many times I have come home, stayed awhile in the car, listening to a song, a story, or a radio program,

Awaiting a natural pause to get out and go into the house, enter the life that awaits me there.

Yet in all those times I did not see exactly this:

(He is now sitting on the hood)

how his nose moves in and out with alertness, his flanks move in and out as he sniffs the air

Then, in sudden change of mood he begins to wash his face, first on one side, and then, in the midst of a yawn, he switches to the other.

Daily I have watched the vermilion cannas before the door, aware of the slow opening of this last bud before the season ends.

Yet until this moment I did not see the graceful sideways twist of this stem

Sinuous as a rising cobra.