[Holly Martins]

I see most of these cat poems are funnies! Here's a sad one - a sort of pendant to my piece on MP:

LEONARD IN WINTER

Leonard staring at December through
the kitchen window, leaves his catty breath
opaquely round on frozen glass.

It’s hard to know exactly what he thinks
but I suppose he wouldn’t understand
how few more winters he will see.

I think of that small unimportant breath
within the cold immensity of space,
and heartless Time that must absorb him.

And so completely that he might as well
have never been alive on earth at all -
immortalised in verse? I think not.

At least he’s with me, purring now. I let
him down and stare out through the icy pane,
and leave my breath where his had been.

[Gail White]

I'm coming late to this, but as I cat lover I can't resist adding to it.

Barbara Loots and I together once produced the following:

BROTHER DOG, SISTER CAT

Dog is dumber than a TV husband,
Trusting as a cuckold in a Shakespeare play,
Faithful as a 19th century butler,
Sentimental as a drunk on New Year's Day.

Cat is cagy as a fortune-teller,
Loopy as a starlet in a 1930's role,
Sensuous as smoke around a stripper,
Elusive as conviction in the soul.

[Martin Rocek]

On watching a cat drinking

It's easy to see a beauty that's mountainous,
but who will praise the vaguely ridiculous,
the awkwardly graceful, the finely laborious?

[Joshua Coberly]

This qualifies, I think...it's about my, um...cat.

From Outside the Bedroom Door


The clatter-prone cat has looped
his neck in the handle of a bag.
It’s contents of panic scatter on the floor
as he careens from room to hall.
Most of the day I was awful to you.
Exhausted, you sleep despite
a spectacular crash into the kitchen cabinets.

I retrieve him at last from behind the toilette.
I am a worthless son of a bitch.
The covers were taught enough to know.
We retire to a chair, the cat
shivering, where both our hearts
can slow: then, the deep bass
of the wind bending the trees in the night.

I will tell you, but not soon,
of the little one and his difficult
extrication; that sleep, by rights,
wasn’t mine; of the wind and its grievances.
Why am I so long to come round?
The cat yawns and leaves for what’s next.
Me, I’ll take the sack off the floor.


[This message has been edited by Joshua Coberly (edited December 26, 2008).]

[Maryann Corbett]

One of my favorites, "Grimalkin" by Thomas Lynch

[Allen Tice]

John Mella declined it. I console myself with the thought that he didn't know what a prat was.

Jim, John Mella's taste is his own. He's published two things of mine, and yet elevated his nose at the one I thought wickedest (about Breadloaf). I think yours is clear enough for him, and not offensive, but, heck, everyone uses words a little differently. That's what makes poetry so great when it works for most folks.

Allen

[Gail White]

From the "Mearns" genre:

I plopped into an easy chair
Upon a cat that wasn't there,
Nor in the bed, nor on the swing...
I wonder why I feed the thing.

[Allen Tice]

Gail:

I think I’ll answer, and hope you smile.
Your absent cat is no exile,
It's nourished to enrich its purr.
The whys of ‘mearns’ don't seem obscure.


Allen

[Jim Hayes]

Here's one John Mella published, although I kinda preferred the Prat one, hm..maybe he did know what prat meant..

Caring for Schrödinger’s Cat

I have a cat I never get to see
even when it’s sitting on my knee.
I can’t give it a hug
or milk poured from a jug,
but I hear it purr: “To be or not to be…”

It belonged, it will incessantly insist,
to a well-known quantum physicist
who proved (while in his care)
it was both here and there –
my cat purrs “I’m a feline solipsist.”

Which means my time is spent in worry that
I’m nothing but the musings of my cat.
This concept’s rather grim,
(my existing at its whim)
but if I could see it once…requiescat!