“Of course they were doomed” opens the poem like a flat, knowing refrain, and the line returns at the end. Ryan J. Eilbeck’s “Calling the Vet” recounts how a group took in a litter of kittens found “cradled by / the torn out seat-stuffing in a hearse on flat tires,” tried to nurse them, and ended up burying at least one. The title never enters the story: no vet is called. What the poem is about, beneath the animal rescue, is the wish to be “gods and healers” and the way that wish curdles into guilt.
The poem moves loosely through time: finding, feeding, death, burial, self-accusation. Its free verse lets lines break at wounding places. “The weak ones / died before the debate on names” leaves death on one line and the small human ceremony of naming on another, as though the two cannot touch. The voice is mostly a collective “we,” which spreads responsibility across the group, but at the burial it narrows to a single “I” digging with a stone—one person left to do the work of concealment.
The imagery keeps flipping between nurture and death. The kittens are taken from a hearse, already linked to mourning, then placed in a warm kitchen and bottle-fed. But the line “none / of it mattered” hangs the word “none” at the end of a line like a verdict. Later, the speaker describes a girl, “soggy-faced,” wrapping her favorite kitten “in a cardboard coffin box / like a Christmas gift.” The simile is deliberately jarring: a box that is both present and casket, tenderness and horror packed together. The kitten “weighed less than a Beanie Baby,” its yellow eyes shut “beneath stuffed animal fur for always.” The toy comparison makes the creature seem impossibly small and also suggests the uncomfortable way people can treat a living thing as an object to be held, chosen, and mourned.
As the poem turns reflective, the language grows violent and mythic. The speaker imagines the mother cat away hunting “when we stole them” and calls the rescuers “kidnappers with sympathy / hemorrhaging from our heads.” That phrase makes compassion sound like an injury. The group had visions of being “in stride with nature,” but the poem answers that dream with the image of humans as “the dictators of soil, the taxidermists / asleep under sewn sacks of stolen feathers.” Care, here, is not separate from taking; it is another form of power.
The ending returns to the shoebox, now an “ambulance” whose opening “sings a corrugated dirge.” The cardboard itself seems to make a funeral sound. The final self-portrait is unforgiving: “With one arm like a sickle, the other a shovel, / doomed to bury everything we’ve touched.” Human hands become tools of cutting and burial, not healing. The poem matters because it complicates an easy story of rescue. It holds genuine love—the formula feedings, the blankets, the careful smoothing of mud—in the same box as control, theft, and failure. The repeated “Of course” makes destiny sound obvious only after the fact, turning the speakers from saviors into mourners who are also implicated in the death they wanted to prevent.