Poemunity — your poem community

An arty feline couple parodies bourgeois gender roles and literary values before the days of  YouTube.

Rain will fall again on your smooth pavement, a light rain like a breath or a step. The breeze and the dawn will flourish again when you return, as if beneath your step. Between flowers and sills the cats will know. There will be other days, there will be other voices. You will smile alone. The cats will know. You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties. You too will make gestures. You’ll answer with words— face of springtime, you too will make gestures. The cats will know, face of springtime; and the light rain and the hyacinth dawn that wrench the heart of him who hopes no more for you— they are the sad smile you smile by yourself. There will be other days, other voices and renewals. Face of springtime, we will suffer at daybreak.

With measured pace, they move in single file, dark hides, white faces, plodding through low grass, then walk into the water, cattle-style, indifferent to the matter where they pass. The stream is high, the current swift—good rain, late snow-melt, cold. Immerging to the flank, the beasts proceed, a queue, a bovine chain, impassive, stepping to the farther bank— continuing their march, as if by word, down valley to fresh pasture. The elect, and stragglers, join, and recompose the herd, both multiple and single, to perfect impressions of an animated scene, the creek’s meanders, milling cows, and sun. Well cooled, the cattle graze knee-deep in green. We leave them to their feed, this painting done.

To Cornelius Nepos Who is it I should give my little book to, So pretty in its pumice-polished covers? Cornelius, I’ll give my book to you: Because you used to think my nothings somethings, At the time when you were the first in Italy To dare to write our whole long history, Three volumes, under the sign of Jupiter, Heroically achieved; so take this little Book of mine for what it’s worth; whatever; And oh, patroness Virgin, grant that it shall Live and survive beyond the century.

Unreel the human weave to molten stone And still you’ll find the upraised arm of  Cain. The hand that rigged the flesh in Abu Ghraib Caressed another’s for the feel of  home.

Soft kisses may be innocent; But ah! too easy maid, beware; Tho’ that is all thy kindness meant, ’Tis love’s delusive, fatal snare. No virgin e’er at first design’d Thro’ all the maze of love to stray; But each new path allures her mind, Till wandering on, she lose her way. ’Tis easy ere set out to stay; But who the useful art can teach, When sliding down a steepy way, To stop, before the end we reach? Keep ever something in thy power, Beyond what would thy honour stain: He will not dare to aim at more, Who for small favours sighs in vain.

Beyond the field of grazing, gazing cows the great bull has a pasture to himself, monumental, black flanks barely twitching from the swarming flies. Only a few strands of wire separate us—how could I forget my childhood terror, the grownups warning that the old bull near my uncle’s farm would love to chase me, stomp me, gore me if I ever got too close. And so I skirted acres just to keep my distance, peeking through the leaves to see if he still was watching me, waiting for some foolish move— those fierce red eyes, the thunder in the ground— or maybe that was simply nightmares. It’s getting hard to tell, as years themselves keep gaining ground relentlessly, their hot breath on my back, and not a fence in sight.

I took my boy to hear an echo. He wanted to hear one. I wanted him to. We wended through a half-formed unintelligible brushy wood to a place I knew called “cave.” It had openings at both ends and could be seen through, not into. Nor was it a tunnel, strictly, though it passed through the ground, though it went somewhere. It was like stepping into a telescope unseen, into the dark distorted center. The walls were arched and laid with glazed tiles, orange, aqua, muddy green and so streaked with nervous lines where water had run down, where water must have trellised down still. It was not clean. It smelled of piss. Chicken bones, empties, old rubbers, mold. Echo, I called. So did my boy. But his voice was small—birdscratch—it got all lost inside the echo my voice made; pale echo, barely one. That was when I had a boy. I’m quite sure I did. I wanted one, back then, when I had something to offer, when I wasn’t in this place, where light passes through me, when I wasn’t like this, which is what, when I wanted one, as he, poor boy, wanted me.

I’ve carved a cave in the mountainside. I’ve drilled for water, stocked provisions to last a lifetime. The walls are smooth. We can live here, love, safe from elements. We’ll invent another love that can’t destroy. We’ll make exquisite reproductions of our selves, immortal on these walls. And when this sea that can’t support us is burned clean, when the first new creatures crawl from it, gasping for water, air, more wondrous and more wild than earth’s first couple, they shall see there were two before them: you and me.

Put an ear to the light at fall of dark and you will hear nothing. This pale luminescence that drifts in upon them makes a blue bole of their caves, a scare of their scything tails. They tell in the bubbling dark of images that come in upon them when light spreads like an oil slick and sea fans that once were their refuge turn away. Now there is no dark dark enough for their silver tails, scatter of color (like coins massively piling in the lap of a miser) that was, in the day, their pride. How hugely here we belong. This is their song in the silting drift of the reef. They have never seen the moon nor the black scut of night, stars spread like plankton in their beastly infinities.