Anybody’s Animal

In the children’s dance class,
a circus of seven-year-olds
alternates between sea life
clinging to the ocean floor
and creatures who fly
out of the water’s surface,
and one of them, the blunt-cut blond,
the sleek, leaping and incredibly fast
Spinner Dolphin, she belongs to me
like our black-and-white cat
who chows on the pebbles of brown food
we chime into his bowl each day
and who, when startled by my presence,
opens the film of his second eyelid,
like some feral, unnamed stray,
to an awareness that, yes,
that one, the human
waiting for the daily kettle to boil
or vacuuming that tired patch of carpet
she belongs to me.