Today is 
and also 
and also
FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING DAY
So I have chosen a favorite poem by a favorite poet and a favorite teacher, Pattiann Rogers; in which a cat makes a brief, but critical, appearance:
The Next Story
All morning long
they kept coming back, the jays,
five of them, blue-grey, purple-banded,
strident, disruptive. They screamed
with their whole bodies from the branches
of the pine, tipped forward, heads
toward earth, and swept across the lawn
into the oleanders, dipping low
as they flew over the half-skull
and beak, the blood-end of the one wing
lying intact, over the fluff
of feathers scattered and drifting
occasionally, easily as dandelion –
all that the cat had left.Back and forth, past one another,
pausing as if listening, then sharply
cutting the morning again into shard
upon shard of frantic and crested descent,
jagged slivers of raucous outrage,
they kept at it, crying singly, together,
alternately, as if on cue, discordant
anthem. The pattern of their inconsolable
fear could be seen against the flat
spring sky as identical to the pattern
made by the unmendable shatter
of disjointed rubbish on the lawn,
all morning long.Mothers, fathers, our kind, tell me again
that death doesn’t matter. Tell me
it’s just a limitation of vision, a fold
of landscape, a deep flax-and-poppy-filled
gully hidden on the hill, a pleat
in our perception, a somersault of existence,
natural, even beneficent, even a gift,
the only key to the red-lacquered door
at the end of the hall, “water
within water,” those old stories.But this time, whatever is said,
when it’s said, will have to be more
reverent and more rude, more absolute,
more convincing than these five jays
who have become the five wheeling spokes
and stays of perfect lament, who, without knowing
anything, have accurately matched the black
beaks and spread shoulders of their bodies
to all the shrill, bird-shaped histories
of grief; will have to be demanding enough,
subtle enough, shocking enough, sovereign
enough, right enough to rouse me, to move me
from this window where I have pressed
my forehead hard against the unyielding pane,
unyielding all morning long.
This poem is from Splitting and Binding. Other books by Pattiann Rogers include:
[The cat picture is from a batik greeting card; I have only the front and do not know who the artist is; but the card was purchased at the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center Fair Trade Store.]
Leave a Reply