The thought that Toulouse was not just
our younger cat but instead our youngest

son come back in the flesh—that came later—
came after the cat moved in

with his sister, a mid-pandemic choice,
with new names; came after they

explored our daughter’s bedroom, stepped
to the kitchen, sniffed living room corners,

found where to nap and where the food
would be when, where to wait for us

to come home from jobs, discovered
how to hide under the sofa.

Toulouse was the black cat leaping from chair
to sofa, zooming across the room before breakfast

from his sister, Artie, the calico soon
asleep in the chair with us, a daily routine until

our daughter told us, one day, their other names,
that Toulouse

on the street had answered to Antonio,
kept by children, and then a poor man,

rescued near a trash bin, Betsy and
Antonio, the one I could sometimes

on walking into a room, mistake
for a pair of black boots, now

entered my suspicion: could this really be
Michael Anthony, our son, sitting near a chair

and glaring, bored again, living on in the sleek,
underfed body of this rescued black cat?

Why I let it drop, why I didn’t act on a
hunch, test Antonio,

mention the names of all of Michael’s friends,
or see the cat react to a dish from a former favorite

restaurant, watch for a startle or a glare,
some small familiar shift in those black eyes

rounded at the bottom by thin green moons. In grief,
till then, till that day, it had not been in me to stop

this looking, this turning corners around hope, till now
to see the test was coming from a part in another time,

another life all done now, and Toulouse, our
black cat, still young and small

with the black eyes crescented by green, was seeking,
expecting a treat, a toy, a bird on a wing.