What Does Not Happen

Sometimes they fall asleep, their head

cradled in the crook of your arm. Your hand

flat on the sternum feels it rise and fall:

the little catches of snores, like 

the sudden shift of weight in a canoe.

You go on working, of course,

sorting through the muscles of the neck

with your other hand, for all the world

as if you were on solid ground.

But you are launched

on the wide water of sleep, and the ripples

wander wider, lapped behind but running ahead

in circles that need not ever end.

You do not rest your head on their breast:

you do not travel with them,

You do not lay your own troubles down

and fall asleep; you do not wake together

after a sweet ten hours' sleep 

to find yourselves each with four sweet paws

stretching your new cat bodies,

catching with your new cat noses, lifted to morning,

scents dull human snouts have never known.