How to Read a Cat
Marguerite Matisse (“Girl with a Black Cat”) by Henri Matisse She holds the cat in her lap like an open book she has often stooped to read. She’d read it now, if she had one more set of hands. Instead, she runs her hands over the soft fur as if her fingers could read this new kind of Braille, decode the Morse signals of its purr that tumble through its lush coat. In other words, anagrams of contentment written in the darkest kind of ink. The fact that it is all black and sleeps on her lap almost everyday has taught her to sit up in her straight back chair, ignore the...
Read MoreBird and Cows
Poem inspired by the Ken Burns film, “Jazz.” Someone has told him, half in jest, that cows Are very fond of music. Now the “Bird,” Car idling in a midnight pasture, blows Cool alto sax for an astonished herd. Bewildered livestock turn their gaze horn-ward, The jazz man’s leaning figure doubled in The turgid depths of bovine eyes, each chord A galaxy poised waiting to begin. The horn’s unfurling cry is almost human, Decries the agony of what it means To be a cow — and what to be a man — What grand improvisations lie between. The onyx sky transcribes ascending bars Brilliant...
Read MoreMaud Gonne
“…I strove To love you in the old high way of love….” —W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse” In all the photographs her hair is dark, Simply restrained, perhaps a trifle wild; Her eyes — dark too — are eyes that have beguiled A poet’s heart, and known it. Their cold spark Blazes down decades, the emblazoned arc Of meteors through Celtic...
Read MoreThe fresh and promising morning
Take my hand. First, tie your shoelaces. Inhale all that can be. Fill your capacious lungs with the breath of every promise. Each is yours. Geraniums wild in flamenco ruffle, teased into some mysterious preen, pastel chins high, arrogantly Andalusian, mesmerized by the collective hum of my workaholic bees, hysterical planters of the sun. They are mine and dance for me. In all the spaces that are empty, know that it is you who stand inchoate. You are my filler of...
Read MoreLate November (II)
Today in Virginia, unseasonably cold, high only in the mid 30’s. I think of a night drive from Austerlitz an hour north to bring in my plants, early September. The sky tangerine, guava and teal. My own house strangely quiet, my cat at my mother’s. When I think of a night I drove from Austerlitz to bring in the plants, my mother young enough to swoop up suitcases, my cat, I was looking for someone. “Aren’t you glad you still have me?” my mother purred. The cat I got after that one, now going on 21, the ice yesterday a...
Read MoreLate November (I)
one minute, the sun was out, it was fall. Geraniums under a quilt last night, a blotch of red opening. On the front step what looked like lint has small pink claws and feet. Next the sky was the color of lead. Geraniums under a quilt last night like a child you’ve tucked in or a body wrapped in the earth under leaves. In the swirl of sudden snow, what was left of the headless fur blows west Like a child you’ve tucked in whatever was living, a just born squirrel I suppose, hardly a living thing except for feet. In fifteen...
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