Contrary to Popular Assumption, Cats Often Enjoy Cheese

On real people. Or people who become real.
On the hatred of a certain author’s Neat Houses lined neatly together on neat roads that go nowhere.
On magic. Not spells or incantations or charms, but those under which people fall, perhaps becoming real.

Writing a girl as a photograph. She cannot be unless edited with chemicals, ink, blurred parts and frowzy hair, intentionally for anticipation of a tenure, articulating homework not her own in a thrift-store pullover that indicates cats and discarded memories and fingerprinted lenses. Her jeans, too much last century, forming perfect lines so unlike this century’s sprayed-on “jeans” that reveal perfect lines.

How does one manage disheveled, dusty, baggy and still exist? Essentially a fly-paper that attracts weirdos that are not real – do not exist. But the voice and the reticence and the averted gaze whisper “unreal” while it all seems unintentionally intentional while the self-same stickers affirm what seems to be what she is [not] saying without ever mentioning it.

By a passing admission of cats, both dead and alive, and simply not here. Reading rare monographs on tin-type and cyan as if everyone else should be. Introverted enough that a sudden press for paper-encased foam might foment a quaking cry later on after dinner (if she can get through the mundane-ity of that, even). Expert in balancing exposure suspended in a didactic public revelation, over clothed and perpetually frumpy, but clearly not beneath all that. Jeans are always telling.

___________________________

About somebody I’ve met before, but don’t actually know who enough to write about, but thought about enough for a few minutes, enough to write about. Word paintings don’t have to be right, if they still make a picture.

Comfortable

There’s a tiny black cat
Thousands pass close as
in the middle of the road
She lies in state
comfortable

Look into her wide
sleeping eyes
You’ll glimpse in a flicker
the kitten in the lies

I left a chair
on the front porch in the sun
and a screwed up ball of yarn
in case her ghost came back home

Or maybe
just my memory
of whiskers and a tail
straight as nails

In a year or three
or maybe a day, we’ll see
it could be me
beneath a tiny black tree
comfortable

Pablo’s Muse

A demon at rest
Ordains his own ablutions
Without betraying his
Awareness
Of our regard
In the night

The visceral range
Of something so vital
That does not move
Does not care
About my night
Or yours

Might be deity
He might be a vision
Of concrete fresh laid
That only he could traverse
Without prints
Right past us

The cat is ever immense
Despite its diminution
Unlike fellow creatures
He makes us small
Like the interest
Of the world

_______________________
Response to Pablo Neruda's Cat's Dream