"Enough" by Ralph Culver

In barely a whisper he muttered the cat’s name. She sat, ignoring him, by the sliding glass doors in the dining room, where out in the yard two crows against a backdrop of new snow had her full attention. An imperious exhaustion suddenly came over him, and for the first time that he could remember he felt with absolute certainty that he would never make it to the bed. There was still a little bourbon in the glass. I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink. No no no. The cat did not move as she watched the crows. There there, he thought. There there.

Ralph’s has been widely published over the years, appearing most recently in The High Window (UK) with poems forthcoming soon in Plume (USA) and Queen's Quarterly (Canada). His latest collection is A Passable Man (2021), about which Nina MacLaughlin in The Boston Globe wrote "These are physical poems, attuned to natural rhythms and those rhythms' effects on spirit and body both. ...Quiet wisdom, which is the best kind of wisdom, lives in his lines."