Cats

Carved in Stone 13

13

What is life?
Is it just an illusion,
as Calderón tells us,
and nothing but a dream?

And what is time?
Does it bend, as Dalí shows us
when his surreal clock breaks into pieces,
time and numbers flying off
as it explodes over a waterfall?

Another clock folds –
a pancake draped
over the bough of a tree.
 
Time – a water clock,
a marked candle,
a grandfather clock,
with Roman numerals,
and time marching,
round and round,
erasing the past,
establishing a future
that will itself
soon be erased.

And what am I
but a moment on time’s clock,
a drop in the clepsydra,
a striation on a flickering candle,
a piece of roughly polished sea-glass
perched on a lonely beach?

Commentary:

Well, Moo has done me proud this time. Two early paintings, both depicting aspects of time, as conceived by Moo. In the first, time is seen as a tick-tock time bomb, or rather a set of tick-tock time-bombs. In the second, in imitation of Salvador Dali (Moo always set his sights high!), a clock going over a water fall and the hours flying off the clock face as time bends. So, tell me if you can, what is time?

Perhaps more important, what is life? Is it a dream, an illusion? And if it is a dream, what happens when we wake up? I know what happens when I wake up – I get up and go pee. Is that to be my final reality? By extension, is life our only reality? Or is our life a series of lives, as some religions would persuade us? And if a cat has nine lives, how many lives do we have? Can they be numbered? Or, like innumerable onions, do we peel away layer after layer? And if so, what is in the centre of the onion when we finally get down that far?

And why do some people write center while others write centre? Is life an illusion, a play? If so does it take place in a theatre or a theater? Or is really a sort of metatheatre or metatheater, life in rings, like the onion, lay after lay, layer after layer? Oh dear, this is all much too complicated. I’ll ask Moo to paint me a painting of life and we’ll see what he comes up with. He’s a bit lazy at the moment and his paint brush has the bends and refuses to cooperate. It’s probably made of cat bristles, and is untrainable and almost impossible to train, let alone to herd. Never mind. We’ll abandon all this for now and give the cat the task of training Moo to paint another painting.

Carved in Stone 10 & 11

10

Firelight dances,
bringing things back to life.

Each morning,
I take time to empty my mind
of those restless cats
I herd at night as they shimmy
through my troubled dreams.

By day, each cat
throws a different shadow
that parades before me
in the sweetness of soft sunlight
where a honeyed sweetness reigns
and no bitterness dwells.

My own cat haunts me,
purring for butter,

sitting there, staring,
eyes wide open, hypnotic.

What, I wonder,
does she really want
as she turns her back,
walks away,
and stalks a different prey
among my books?

11

Does she hear the clock’s dry tick
and sense the Roman numerals
marching round, left – right – left,
always in step
with the pendulum’s sway.

Does she recall migrating birds
or those gaudy summer butterflies,
fanning their wings
as they perch on Cone Heads,
Bees’ Balm, Black-eyed Susans,
generic butterflies,
specific flowers,
planted by my own hands?

I often ask myself –
“What does she know
that I don’t know?”

Commentary:

A strange thing knowledge. I have learned the hard way that “the more I know, the more I know I don’t know.” Just look at today’s second stanza. I would love to know more about, and understand better, migrating birds, summer butterflies, especially the lovely Monarchs that fly at Mexico and back, the flowers themselves, the way language substitutes the generic (butterflies, flowers) for the specific (Red Admirals, buttercups), and as for that cat, I really would like to know what she knows that I don’t know. I have never been able to train her, but she has certainly managed to train me!

And I would love to understand humor and laughter. Slapstick aside, humor is one of the cultural secrets that travels least in translation. Jokes in French or Spanish just do not translate well into English. It takes a deep cultural and linguistic knowledge to grasp foreign humor at first glance.

Take today, for instance. I drove the car to the garage to change the tires from summer to winter. I asked the garage guy, my friend, if he would drive me home, and he said he would. He got i the passenger side and I drove home. Then he drove the car back to the garage. He opened the garage doors, drove the car in, turned the engine off, hoisted the car up, and changed the tires. When he’d finished, he tried to start the engine. No luck. He called me – “Where’s the key?” “In my pocket!” I replied. We were having such fun chatting we never thought to offer or request the car key when we exchanged drivers. Well, we are all still laughing about it.

When I got into the house, even the cat was laughing, and as for that cat, I really would like to know what she knows that I don’t know. Maybe, it’s just that we humans, especially as we age, aren’t as clever as we sometimes think we are. Some things, I guess, I’ll never know.

Hallowe’en

Hallowe’en

1

Today is All Hallows Eve.
Tomorrow is Oaxaca’s
Day of the Dead.
The clocks change
the day after tomorrow.

Today, it’s raining,
and rain is a trick when
it forces celebrants off the streets
and town councils vote to change
the traditional date and send
young children out trick and treating
on a dry, warmer night.

But this rain, after drought,
is a Hallowe’en treat.

It brings a promise
that the aquifers will refill
that wells will not run dry,
and above all,
it brings us hope.

2

Around us, fall thrives
and watches and clocks
will soon fall back.

Trees weep for lost leaves.
Flowers that flourished
now wither and perish.

Hollyhocks topple and fall.
Bees’ Balm is abandoned
by butterflies and bees.

3

I expect time
to change with the clocks
and my body clock
will soon be out of sync
with the tick-tock chime
that denounces each hour.

Hours that used to wound
now threaten to kill.
They used to limp along,
but now they just rush by
and I, who used to run
from point to point,
now shuffle a step at a time.

But still I live in hopes to see
the clocks spring forward
once more.


Commentary:

A great poem for Hallowe’en, even if I say so myself, and I haven’t even mentioned the Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Oh, woe is me. Shame and scandal in my poetry.

Game Six of the World Series on Hallowe’en – wow! – well, one team will get a treat and the other will receive a very disappointing trick. I know which team I support, but I don’t know who will win this time around.

Having said that – with substantial rain after drought, everybody in my province is a winner. And who could wish for more than that?

My favorite cat

My favorite cat

Pebbles have caught in my throat.
The word-river once flowing smooth
now backs up to spill leaf-freckled foam
over the tiniest barriers of branch and weed.

When I speak, some gypsy I find
has stolen my tongue, and my voice
is that of a changeling whisked away
from the cradle whilst her guardians slept.

Now leaves outside my window grow
rusty with autumn rain. A sharp-shinned hawk
no bigger than the blue jay he stalks
drives like a whirlwind at our feeder.

In dawn’s early light, a Great Barred owl
flaps enormous wings and drops like a stone
on my favorite cat, lifting her up and away.

Commentary:

Not a true story – sorry, my friends. However, I did see a Great Barred Owl swoop down on my neighbor’s cat. A canny old cat that one. He rolled over on his back, hissing and spitting, and showing all his unsheathed claws. Then he let out a most unnerving high-pitched whining sound and the owl backed off. Nature red in tooth and claw and our own backyard a battle ground where wild creatures roam and prey on each other.

Luckily, as a poet, I need neither seek nor deliver the truth, in any sense of the word. What I search for is emotional impact – words that ring true, even if they are not. Moments that reach out and grab us when and where we least expect it. As someone once said – never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Same with jokes.

And speaking of jokes, cross-cultural jokes are some of the most difficult things for a language learner to grasp. Humor exists in many forms. Silent comedy, like slapstick, does not need an interpreter. However, jokes based on cultural understanding are remarkably difficult to follow, unless one is totally immersed in the culture. As for linguistic jokes, even the sharpest individual can be defeated by word play and double meanings. I remember word plays from my beginner’s language classes that still leave me cold. Sorry, I just don’t find them funny even when explained. Clever, maybe, but funny? No way. Molière for example – Trissotin / trois fois fous. Really? ne dis pas que c’est amaranthe, dis plutôt que c’est de ma rente. Or, from the Spanish of Fuenteovejuna, Lope de Vega – Ciudad Real es del Rey. I hope you are splitting your sides over that one – I have never been able to laugh at it and still can’t understand what’s funny about it. C’est la vie, I guess.

Alone

Alone

the longing
to belong
appears from
nowhere

I want
to lose myself
in something bigger
than myself

religion
can bite like that
church and altar
feast days
incense and candles
confession
repentance
forgiveness
then sin again

I am not religious
not in that sense

nor am I militant
right arm raised
goose-stepping
in a parade
each step in time
with every one else

if that’s the meaning
of belonging
I guess I’ll continue
to dream alone

Commentary:

Moo thinks that Princess Squiffy, out at the front of the parade, a solitary cat, all alone and on her own, would be perfect for this poem. I am not so sure. Everybody is so happy, so engaged, except for Princess Squiffy aka Vomit, who is vanishing into the woodwork – about to plan and execute her next act of sabotage, I guess. Yes, Vomit! She’s the one who throws up in my chair.

The meaning of meaning – such a simple phrase, such a complicated philosophical history. How does one ‘belong’? In what ways can one ‘belong’? Does one yearn to belong or long to belong? And what does it mean – to belong? Does my cat belong to me? Does my dog belong to me? Cat and dog are long dead now – so how can they belong to me? And when I am gone, all my belongings will belong to someone else. A strange world, eh? And yet I long to belong in it for as long as possible.

The two most dangerous words in the world – thine and mine. Cervantes wrote that somewhere. For thine and mine are possessives. They teach us to possess things, to claim them as ours. My house, my garden, my trees, my flowers, my lawn. With the drought that has occurred this summer and into the fall, I can no longer say my lawn, my flowers, my garden, for they have all dried up and marched along, privatim et seriatim, – a touch of Kipling there, Storky and Co. if I remember correctly, and I don’t, because I just checked and it’s Stalky not Storky! – into whatever happy gardens dead flowers and gardens inhabit in their after life.

I think one of the most dangerous games ever invented is Monopoly. Make no mistake, I love my Monopoly set – especially the top hat and the flat iron – but what do we learn from Monopoly and from all similar types of game playing and role modelling? Why, to gather everything into our hands hands and possess everything on the Monopoly Board. At least when we play chess, we defeat an opponent by check-mating his / her king. We don’t have to accrue all 31 pieces on our side of the board leaving the poor king alone on the other. Even Fox and Hounds – and that’s an impossible game to win when you’re the fox- doesn’t humiliate anyone in quite that fashion. Ah well, the meaning of the meaning of Monopoly – Happy Canadian Thanksgiving – we can all have a good rant about that one.

What’s in a name?

What’s in a name?

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” What’s in a name? And how do we name things? Perhaps, more important, why do we name them? Perhaps when we name something, we feel that we control, if not the thing itself, then perhaps our relationship to it.

The Naming of Cats – that seems to be a strange place to start. To begin with, do we think we can control our cats when we name them? Now that is a very good question. And what name should we give to a cat when, in the words of T. S. Eliot and Old Possum, only a cat knows its one and only inscrutable name.

So, is a cat inscrutable? Does a cat have the inscrutable smile of the Sphinx? I wonder what the cat, pictured above, is thinking. One, two, three, where’s my breakfast? Oh yes, that’s Rudyard Kipling, my dearly beloveds, as you well know. Or do you? So much knowledge is being lost, swallowed up by the black hole of AI that is gnawing away at our brains the same way the moon gnaws at the sun disc in a solar eclipse.

“Sitting on my back porch watching the moon
devouring the sun with a big, black spoon.”

So what would we like to call the inscrutable cat who lounges so luxuriously on the bed in the above picture? Old Deuteronomy? No. Princess Squiffy? No. Willow, as in Pussy Willow? No. That’s somebody else’s cat. Blackjack? No. Blackjack is a black dog and this cat is white. Seamus? Sorry – wrong house, wrong family, wrong set of memories. Spot? No. Sorry, that’s what my grandfather called his zebra. Smudge? No. No smudges on that beauty. Sphinx? Or Sphincter? No. Mustn’t be rude.

Control. It’s all about control. Do you really think we can control that cat merely by naming it? Or , as is all too often the truth, do you thank that a cat like that actually controls us. In that case we must move from Thy Servant a Dog to Thy Master (or Mistress) a Cat.

“Do you like Kipling?”
“Not really. I never Kipple.”

So how about Master? Mistress? Colonel Bogey? Sergeant Major? Boss? Top Cat? Prince or Princess? Queen or Queenie? Please send your answers on a postcard to the North Pole via dog sled, preferably before Christmas, and maybe Santa will send you a nice present – if you give Saucy Sue her correct name.

PS. It’s not Saucy Sue. Roll the dice and try again.

Choices

Choices

Winter-low sun in my eyes,
I sit at the breakfast table
blinking back rainbows.

Light quivers into fragments.
Too much light and my world
turns dark. I can no longer see
the computer screen, nor am I
able to write in the old-fashioned
way with pen, ink, and paper.

To continue working, I must lower
the blinds or move to the other room
away from the sunlight.

Another option:
to forget deadlines and schedules
to lay down my pen, to close my eyes,
to bask in early morning pleasures,
purring like an ageing cat
enjoying the sun.

Comment:
A Golden Oldie that suddenly surfaced from “among my souvenirs”, as Connie Francis once sang. Or was it twice? Sunshine is certainly a magic balm for old bones. Only now am I starting to understand the wisdom of animals, that old dog, lying in the sun, the ageing cat curled up in a sunny window, the ancient donkey, seeking warmth, away from the shade. Such joy in the small things that make life so much better.

What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

Daily writing prompt
What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?
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What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

To the best of my knowledge, my parents only had three traditions. I have not kept any of them.

Tradition 1: They took two weeks holiday every year in August. Both were hard-working, and that holiday was always a precious break from work. Being employed in academia and a life-long inhabitant of the Ivory Tower, I have not had holidays forced upon me by a 9 to 5 work schedule. Research and creativity do not function according to a 9 to 5 clock. I realize how fortunate I am, and I give thanks every day for my intellectual and creative freedom.

Tradition 2: They fought like cats and dogs at every opportunity. It was so bad that, at one stage, in my innocence, I thought that cats were females and that dogs were males, and that was why they opened instant hostilities whenever they saw each other. Luckily, I have no siblings to challenge this view of events, and my parents are long gone, so they won’t be worried either.

Tradition 3: My maternal grandmother’s birthday was just before Christmas. On her birthday, every year when I was a child, my mother would come home early from work, but my father wouldn’t. He often didn’t come home at all. Office parties. My mother would hang around the house for a while, consoling herself. Then she would get angry, tell me to pack a bag, pack one herself, and call a taxi. This would take us to the railway station or the bus station, and off we would go to grandma’s house to celebrate her birthday. My father, looking sheepish and hang-dog, would arrive late Christmas Eve, or early Christmas morning. On Boxing Day, the gloves came off, and they were at it again. That’s why it’s called Boxing Day. Well, that’s what I thought anyway.

So there you have it. Three traditions that my parents had and that I have never kept.

Dogs or Cats?

Daily writing prompt
Dogs or cats?
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Dogs or Cats?

Neither. Teddy Bears. Same reasons hold good for a cat as a dog.

1 Five reasons why a Teddy Bear is much better for you than a Kitty Cat.

            I know, I know: cat lovers will go wild. They think cats are such lovely cuddly things. And they believe strongly that nobody can resist a warm, loving, darling, purring bundle of fur. Well, I can resist cats. And I can give you five good, sound, solid, 25 carat reasons why Teddy Bears beat Kitty Cats any day of the week.

One

            Teddy Bears do not need to be fed on a regular basis. In fact, one piece of kibble will last a Teddy Bear for a very, very long time. And you can’t say the same for your cat. So, less expense, no need to feed, don’t have to put that fresh water down every day, no constant fawning attention when hungry or just plain greedy, don’t have to worry about treading on the cat’s tail … In fact, a Teddy Bear wins out every time.

Two

            “Don’t mention cleaning out the kitty litter. Promise?”

            “I promise. I won’t mention it.”

            “Word of honor?”

            “Word of honor. Fresh Walnut and all that.”

            “You just mentioned it.”

            “Mentioned what?”

            “The kitty litter.”

            “I didn’t.”

            “You did: you said ‘Fresh walnut.’”

            “So?”

            “So that’s what keeps the kitty litter from smelling.”

            “Does it smell much?”

            “Quite a bit. I hate cleaning it out.”

            “Why?”

“It’s so smelly, filthy, grainy, lumpy, stinking.”

“So, why do you do it, then? What you need is a nice, clean, environmentally friendly Teddy Bear. There’s no cleaning up after a Teddy Bear. Who’s ever heard of Teddy Bear Litter?”

            “You said you wouldn’t mention it.”

            “Mention what?”

            “Kitty litter.”

            “I didn’t, you did. I said ‘Teddy Bear Litter’.”

Three

            Teddy Bears don’t have off-spring. You don’t need to neuter them, and they don’t need taking to the vet. Nor do they sit and wait in family groups for their photos to be taken. What we have reproduced elsewhere is a fake photo placed there by the unscrupulous enemy for their own pro-cat propaganda purposes.

Four

            Teddy Bears are very obedient. If you tell a Teddy Bear to “sit” or to “stay”. He does so. Immediately. And he stays where you put him. There’s no clash of wills and egos, no conflict at all. Teddy Bears are easily trained and very obedient. Also, they don’t want to go out in the garden and wander beneath the bushes to shriek and whine when the moon is full. Now, if you have cats and you want them to sit and stay still, you must give them something to watch or to play with. Chipmunks and garden birds aren’t cheap, you know, and they are less trainable than cats. How long do you think it takes to train a chipmunk to just sit there quietly to entertain your cat? Especially when it’s being hissed at and the cat is bouncing the window with anguish? Also, Teddy Bears don’t climb on furniture, nor do they break ornaments, nor sink their claws into your hair as you pass beneath them, nor do they drop on you, unexpectedly, from great heights.

Five

            Fifth and final: when there’s a moth, a fly, or a mosquito on the ceiling at night, you can’t train your kitty cat to fly into the air and snatch it off the ceiling. But as for Teddy: grab him by one leg, preferably the back one; give him his commands “Ready, Teddy, Go!” and hurl him skywards. With a little practice, he’ll nail that nocturnal buzzing monster every time.

            No: all things considered — and I promise I won’t mention that little box the cat sits in — there’s nothing better than a Teddy Bear. Wise, silent, friendly, cuddly, obedient, friendly (did I say that?), needs no training, always there when needed, waits patiently for you when you’re away, never stalks off with tail in air, never gets out and hides in the garden where you can’t find him, adorable, cuddly (did I say that already?)

Give me a Teddy Bear anytime.

 

Situations

Situations

I am sitting at my desk, typing to you.
Many thoughts are running through my head.

I am checking the weather regularly –
high winds and rain are due soon.

Clare has just walked past the window.
She waved at me, but didn’t ask for any help.

The washing is almost dry and needs folding.
 We need to tie down the umbrella and porch chairs.

The cat has just walked across my keyboard.
I correct her footprints. They have typed false words.
 
Now she has discovered the dried blood on the floor.
It soaked into the boards when I cut my arm last night.

I meant to clean it up this morning, but I forgot.
I can hear her tongue rasping as she licks it up.