Cat Sooth

The grass is in seed. The young birds are flying.
Yet the house is not built, even begun.

The vetch has turned purple. But where is the brided?
It is easy to say to those bidden -- But where,

Where, butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller,
Where is un and music and heaven’s highest lust,
For which more than any words cries deeplier?

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out

of dirt .. It is not possible for the moon
to blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

-- Wallace Stevens, from “Ghosts As Cocoons”


****

THE FELINE SUBLIME

Feb. 14, 2006

It’s said that speech gives us wings
but surely they are not the moon’s,
not on so bitter cold and clear
a night as this one, where its
blue wash is too icy bronze, too
clarion for the floppy blunt
clappers my words belfry,
much less buoy on nights
when seas hardest darkest
to sound or shore.
You should hear our cat
converse her desires in this
house, articulate in all
the ways we’re not: she
tympanies her jones for treats
on our bedroom floor around
3 a.m., pounding paws as
small as padded thimbles
in a helterskelter assault
until I’m awake and roused
and about my blurry matins
here, pouring out five shakes
for her from a bag of Whiskas
Temptations. When it’s time
to claim the entire bed she’ll
pace and paw around my wife,
crossing over her sleeping
shape a couple times
& then digging at the covers,
making clear to my waking
wife that her job is now done,
warmth and scent imparted
to that pillow which Violet
claims as her own as
she sleeps throughout the day.
Very articulate and effective
and no more than a mew
from her own lips,
a mere grace note to
thundered needs. Compared
to her I’ve just one drone
for rousing God from bed,
too rude for angels’ tongues
and too tranced with blue
to properly rout the
dungeons of sand castles.
Words on paper are the
worst of ploy of all
for unbagging my cat’s heart,
black squiggles swarthy
in an abstract gout
too wide of the world’s
down dirty rhythms,
refracting the moon
in crazy-quilt whirlings,
contracting ills from
starry jisms. Ah well.
Did I tell you
how our cat will settle
in between my legs as
I fall asleep on nights
as cold as this one,
nudged close into the
heat vent of my loins,
our sleep? Or how our
sleep trances down
the same brainstem
where cat-tailed angels
purr and sing? Or how,
on bitter nights like these,
after I’ve left the bed
and she has had her
treats, she will head
back upstairs to burrow
under the covers & sleep
full against my wife’s
stomach, wombed again
at the threshold of
our difficult descending
from the animal wisdoms
we lose and squander
and forget most here, at
4:05 a.m. on the coldest
morning of the year,
snow deep in Central
Park and sprinklers
snap snap snapping
down the spines of
brittled groves, both
gleaming in the pale
moonlight, the sweetest
juice the world has yet
to freeze?

***


THE PANTHER

Rainer Maria Rilke

In 1905 Rilke moved to Meudon, France to take a job as the secretary of Rodin. When Rilke told Rodin that he had not been writing lately, Rodin's advice was to go to the zoo (the Jardin des Plantes) and look at an animal until he truly saw it.

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.
The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.
Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound . . . then a shape enters,
slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

-- transl. Stephen Mitchell

***


WOMAN AND LEOPARD

David St. John

Jardin des Plantes; the zoo.

Although she was beautiful,
Although her black hair, clipped
Just at the shoulders, glistened
Like obsidian as she moved
With that same slow combination
Of muscles as a dancer stepping
Casually beyond the spotlight
Into the staged, smoky
Blue of the shadows, it was
None of this that bothered me,
That made me follow her as she
Walked with her friends—a couple
Her age—along the wide dirt path
Leading to the island, the circle
Of cages where the cats glared
And paced. She was wearing a leather
Jacket, a simple jacket, cut narrowly
At the waist and dyed a green
I’d always coveted both in
Nature and out. It was the green of
Decay, of earth, of bronze covered by
The fine silt of the city, the green
Of mulch, of vines at the point
Of the most remote depth
In one of Rousseau’s familiar jungles;
It was that jacket I was following—
Its epaulets were torn at the shoulders;
The back was crossed by swatches
Of paler, worn horizons
Rubbed away by the backs of chairs;
Along the arms, the scars of cigarettes
And knives, barbed wire . . .
I think it was she who nailed that poster
To the wall of my small room in
The Hotel des Ecoles, an ancient photo
Of the Communards marching in a phalanx
Toward the photographer, tools
And sticks the poor
Weapons held ready in their hands.
It was a poster left up by every
Student or transient spending a night
Or week in that for-real garret,
Its one window opening out
Onto the roof, letting in both
The sunlight and winter rains, the drops
Or streams from the laundry hung to dry
At the window ledge, all of it
Running down along the poster, leaving
Streaks as ocher as the rivers crossing
The map of Europe pinned to the opposite
Wall. On the poster, faded by
Every year, those at the edge of the march
Had grown more and more ghostly, slowly
Evaporating into the sepia: half men,
Half women, half shadow. And I think
It was she in that leather jacket closing
The door to this room in May 1968 to march
With all the other students to the Renault
Factory, to plead again for some
Last unity. Those scars along the arms
Were neatly sutured in that heavy
Coarse thread that sailors use, a thread
Of the same fecund green. The woman,
Thirty-five perhaps, no more, glanced
At me; I watched
As she moved off away from her friends,
Over to the waist-high, horizontal
Steel rail at the front of the leopard’s
Cage. I moved to one side, to see both
Her face and the face
Of the leopard she’d chosen to watch;
She began to lock it into her precise,
Cool stare. The leopard sat on
A pillar of rock
Standing between the high metal walkway
At the rear of the cage, where its mate
Strolled lackadaisically, and—below
The leopard— a small pond that stretched
Almost to the cage’s front, a pool
Striped blue-and-black by the thin shadows
Of the bars. The woman stood
Very quietly, leaning forward against
The cold steel of the restraint, the rail
Pressing against the bones
Of her hips,
Her hands balled in the pockets
Of her jacket. She kept her eyes on the eyes
Of the leopard . . . ignoring the chatter of
Her friends, of the monkeys, of the macaws.
She cared just for the leopard,
The leopard tensing and arching his back
As each fork of bone pushed up
Along its spine—just
For the leopard
Working its claws along its high perch
Of stone, its liquid jade eyes
Dilating, flashing only for an instant
As the woman suddenly laughed,
And it leapt.