Remember that I finally found you

not the other way around,

how I wandered up your long drive

smelling where my kind had been

the path crisscrossed by rabbits

that I knew cavorted from beneath

bordering cedars through the night

padded over dimpled dents of hoof prints

where deer crossing from the highway

wandered west to  their switchgrass beds

I found your barn blocking my path

and curled up on its concrete pad

to rest in the sun and found myself

seen by a trio inquisitive about my

peregrinations, found them denizens

you’d welcomed earlier, so I stayed

I had no experience then to draw upon

when you loaded me into the little

cage you called a carrier but found

comfort on your t-shirts even while

I was unprepared for the new smells

of a place where many animals had been

my tiny body shuddering through three shots,

the cleaning of my ears, such sensations

like the assaults of woods and field

all so unfamiliar and so when I bit

your finger through with my tiny canine

after you’d rubbed my ears and bony back

for so long, I was only letting you know

of my discomfort in the only way I had

heard you invoke a deity I do not know

except as the voice of thunder, rain

when I curl into myself the way I soon

found myself atop  your t-shirts again

the gentle motion of something lulling

me to sleep and later, the other three

coming to inquire where I’d been when

I finally got to that place I now call home.