catitude

April 20 2008—yr time gardener, aka Klyd Watkins (for you google bots and other searching crawlers) has a day job now, which has left him without the time to implement his plan to rotate Jon Taylor's Baudelaire translations with poems by the usual gang, one a week for as long as it lasts. That will begin soon but good has come out of my delay. Our cattitude groweth with the following sent in by Reed Richards and written . . . let him tell you.

My cat wrote this poem:

Spring Song

The cat purls at your window:
Your garden grow a rainbow
            That vault the height
            Of morning light
And straight into your heart flow.
The bus you ride safe take you,
The job you work rich make you,
            And when night comes
            The boozers and bums
Bother other streets and not wake you.

To earnest scholars, tuition;
To bonds and farmers, fruition;
            Effusions volcanic
            To the honest mechanic;
To landlords and ladies, remission.
To waitresses courses in kindness;
To cops, in one eye, blindness;
            To bosses who yell
            Just a season in hell,
Or more if they need the reminders.

For birds on the lawn, inattention;
For cat-hating dogs, detention;
For cats who sing
At your window in spring
Caresses too many to mention.

Spud

another cat pome—this one from the wonderful David Pointer. Note, one of David's two daughters is named Destiny.

Destiny
keeps a dinosaur fossil
in her first tooth keepsake
box, and Brontosaurus
comic books between the
white buffalo calf bookends
on the mantle piece. She
also points out that on TV
where dinosaurs and humans
evolved together for micromillions
of episodes that there is less
extinction in high definition
animation. I listen while
washing my grandmother's
old Iriquois oven plate as
two power walking widows
of the nightly neighborhood
who promised nothing yet
delivered two serial burglars
while burning big calories
with moderate meaningful
exercise pass by windows
without a cat unworthy or
otherwise to send to The
Time Gardener like a good
and caring poet would do.

David S. Pointer

We interrupt the catitudinal constructions to say Laura Stamps, herself a cat lover and champion of feral cats, has reviewed Kathy Skagg's Poet Laureate of People Who Hate Poetry. In part she says. "Kathy Skaggs has an incredibly strong voice, which reaches out to the reader in every one of these poems." For the rest of this short review visit http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/583830.Laura_Stamps

I can't compare to Charles and Reed, but I can contribute to the cat dialogue. I'm so happy to hear Reed's cat is better.

Gray Baby came to us when we lived in another town. She loved us unconditionally, with such devotion that we found it hard to believe. Gray was my muse. She developed a rare virus and we spent exorbitant sums of money in a desperate attempt to keep her alive. We failed. She's buried on the south edge of our property in a cairn my husband built by hand of concrete blocks and rocks to keep coyotes from digging her up. A couple months after she died, sunflowers grew around her grave in great profusion. Gray loved butterflies so we were delighted to see colorful wings fluttering around the flowers last summer. That small joy, however, did not make up for her loss. I haven't written one creative word since she died. This poem was written when she first came to us, only one of many cats who found their way to our food dishes.

My town's claim to fame is not historic
wagon ruts left by pioneers who headed west
in shabby prairie schooners, or remnants of ancient Indians
who lived in vast encampments 'til the government
usurped their territory. This is the old west,
but legends fade and now their calling card is
feral cats. Cats running wild and multiplying
have overrun this dying town.
Nobody seems to care
that people come from miles around
to dump their pregnant house pets
to have kittens in abandoned, run down buildings.

Gray Baby showed up on our porch, a half grown cat
with fire in her eyes. Patchy fur over bone
is all she was, but cats three times her size
hunkered down or backed away
when Gray approached the food dish.
I tried to run her off at first.
She stood her ground, legs splayed wide
at the claim she'd staked and meant to keep,
growling fiercely as she ate.
And when I dared to run one hand softly
along her back, she purred and closed her eyes
in feline ecstasy to feel that kindly touch.
What little life she had left in her had once known
the human touch and tenderness.

"OK, I'll let you stay Gray Baby. What's
one more stray cat to feed?", I said.
Next day she proudly brought her babies
to the porch. Three black kittens, fat and healthy
from their mother's milk and care.
She must have lived on grasshoppers and crickets
to make milk for such big kittens,
all three near as big as her.
Gray had been a family pet, abandoned
when her family moved, or dumped
because she had a growing belly.
She wanted people, houses, human love,
to use a litter box again and chase a ball.
Gray is healthy now, she's spayed, well fed.
She sings a purring song to show her love
and gratitude—just one rescued from the thousands
like her in this town, a town indifferent to anything
that doesn't promote tourism.

Hey Klyd –
Charles Ries’s poem about the cat struck pretty deep, especially since my cat got terribly ill with a virus last week and I thought I was going to lose him and spent a fortune getting him better. People’s reactions to cats are always interesting. I’ve never thought my cat (Spud) was terribly smart, but if he went outside and never came back – he’s an inside cat like Mr. Ries’s – I’d feel it was a judgment on me and not on him. I like how the poem communicates the sweetness and intelligence of a cat with a story that shows how they make their points so softly that we often don’t understand that they have affected us until long after the fact. Some people think that is insidious and manipulative, even passive-aggressive, but I think Mr. Ries and I both know that cats are just cats. Sure they know what they are doing when they affect us and make us love them. Dogs do it too. It’s funny that people who place moral judgments on the behavior of cats aren’t willing to admire how they stand up to challenges and even seek them out, for instance, how in a group of people they will cultivate the ones who don’t like them. Mr. Ries asks, “Well, animals are all pretty dumb aren’t they?” suspecting, though he grew up in circumstances that encouraged him to view animals as objects, that it’s not true. (Coincidentally, I spent a small part of my childhood living on a mink farm.) His answer is something like: Yes they are dumb enough to enlarge our understanding of love. The cat’s sitting and staring while he writes is testimony to her regard for him, but he rejects her (or thinks he is rejecting her) as a muse. But cats do some of their best work against that kind of resistance. That and her scratching on the door remind me of Robert Hayden’s description of “love’s austere and lonely offices.” Animals often understand our “human-heartedness”, to borrow Les Murray’s term, better that we do.

I really thought Spud was a goner last week, and even though he is about 19 years old I wasn’t ready for it. But this week he is all fixed and acting like he would have been just fine without all the intervention, so why the fuss? Typical. I don’t think he is human, but I know he is a person.

Reed