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Haiku Wars

LIFE WITH POET

Life with Poet was good, though I had to put my paw down about one thing. The pet store clerk had led him to believe that the proper sleeping condition for us ferrets is locked in a cage.

After months of pet farm and pet store incarceration, I was in no mood to stay confined while darkness settled deliciously over the city—with all the tantalizing cheeps and chirrs of insects and frogs filling the sticky-warm New Orleans air, sending shivers of excitement up and down my jelly spine. And yet, despite my mad, wiggling protests, when night fell after our first day together Poet carried me over to my plastic and steel prison—a dreary mauve-colored cell with a dangling water bottle and absurdly small litter box—into which, unceremoniously, he tossed me.

Click! went the latch.

He muttered, “G'night, Oscar”—for that's the name he had given me—and left me there, outraged.

Poet slept in the next room on a big, green futon by a screen door that opened to a second-floor balcony and leafy oak branches. A window fan, placed at that door, stirred the soupy air. After a six-pack of cheap beer and a late-late movie, he finally fell asleep. Soon, he was snoring.

Good, I thought.

What I did next requires some explanation.

First, you must understand that I wasn't an ordinary ferret, that lifetime. While physically I appeared as a supple and furry creature exuding an intoxicating musk, spiritually I was what Buddhists call a bodhisattva: an enlightened being not quite finished with this world of suffering. Instead of moving on to some flower-stuffed paradise or dissolving into the Oneness of the universe (even we aren’t sure what happens when we let go of everything and move on), bodhisattvas like me linger in the world on a mission of mercy, striving to help other beings, fellow travelers, to wake up. The traveler whom I was particularly interested in helping to wake up at the time was my Poet. Earlier that day, when he arrived at the pet store, I was tingling from nose to tail. He was the one; I knew it! "Excuse me, Miss." He distracted the teenager sale's girl from her tattoo magazine.

"Yes?"

"This little guy here." He pointed down at me. "How much?"

All alone in that cramped cage strewn with pissy cedar shavings, I made a sorry sight. My three sisters (a dull lot) had all been sold one by one, so I must have appeared to Poet quite sad and forlorn as I lay curled in a corner, my head resting on my soft bottom, staring unblinking into space.

Actually, I wasn’t lonely or sad. I was just taking a break from a long morning of trying out my newest body, exploring all the interesting ways it curved and bent. When Poet leaned in close to peer at me through those thick, black-rimmed glasses of his, I thought, Ah, the bald fellow! He’s the one! It’s about time. He fished a credit card from his jeans pocket to meet the salesgirl's lofty price, then took me home to a second floor shotgun apartment in Mid-City, New Orleans. Following the salesgirl's recommendation, he strategically placed litter boxes in various corners, one per room, so that I could follow my ferret urges and mark my territory, which I immediately, bountifully, did. Everything was going fine. Great Buddha had brought us together and all was well until, that first night, Poet had the audacity to jail me, his personal bodhisattva!

I got to work.

I focused my thoughts, sucked a deep breath, and hurled my astral self completely out of my furry body, through the bars of the cage, through the wall . . . smack into Poet's head. More exactly, into the dream he was having just then.

This was no easy task, even for me. Though I had perfected the ability to visit the minds of others in past lives, this feat is much easier accomplished if the being in question happens to be close by or, even better, in physical contact with one’s earthly body. Projecting one’s astral self across a room, through a wall, and halfway across another room is a difficult, draining task. Still, my freedom was at stake, so I strained with all my might to be where I now was: inside Poet's dream.

I parked my spirit-self behind the gnarled trunk of an oak tree that stood with its great branches sprawling to all directions in a vast, spotless airport terminal. Poet stood waiting at the end of a long line behind countless life-sized Barbie dolls—all blonde and all wearing pink. Each life-sized Barbie held in her plastic grip a large, round, pink hat box.

Keeping just out of Poet’s line of sight, I started scratching my claws on the marble floor: scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch; softly at first but gradually increasing the volume until it sounded like great iron rakes scraping the hull of a battleship.

SCRITCH-SCRATCH! SCRITCH-SCRATCH!

"Oscar?!" He woke up.

My soul returned to my ferret body like a yo-yo zipping back to the hand that had tossed it. Poet stumbled into my room, threw on the light, knelt, and peered into my cage. His sleepy, whisker-stubbled face was easy to read. He thought that I had somehow escaped and had been cavorting in the vicinity of his futon, but seeing me now where he didn't expect to see me—behind prison bars—befuddled him deeply.

Poet was smart enough to hold a Ph.D. in literature but slow when it came to life’s practical lessons. One of the latter usually wasn't enough for him.

The light switched off, and back to the front room, to his futon, he shuffled. Eventually, he was once again snoring thunder. Summoning every remaining ounce of spiritual energy, again I hurled myself mightily into his cranium.

This time, the dream venue was a supermarket—the aisles wide enough for a garbage truck to drive down, which indeed was happening. Poet, his back to me, was pushing an empty shopping cart up a colossal aisle, following the truck. This was going to be a scary dream, I noticed: through gaps between cereal boxes I spotted a pair of Bengal tigers the next aisle over. As he pushed his groaning cart, oblivious to the tigers, they exactly matched his forward progress, bellies to linoleum, stalking him. It would be an act of mercy, I thought, to wake him now. So, like before, I started scratching my astral body’s claws, this time on the polished tile floor just behind his heels, louder and louder and LOUDER!

When he snapped awake, he shuffled over to my cage again, shrugged, yawned, and, this time, unlatched its little door. He swung it wide and returned without a word to his futon.

So that's how I got the run of the apartment, day and night. From that night on I was free to explore all the crannies and crevices of the place: the dusty space under the refrigerator, the inner labyrinth of the kitchen cabinetry, the precarious caverns of the junk closet . . . even a secret passage I found one early morning, following a pipe, into the neighbor’s kitchen. Life, indeed, was good.

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