Pss Pss
poems abt cats, fame, death, coffee
Did She Have a Face?
Before coffee: I start my day thinking of my melting muscles, the insult of my abdomen, the audacity of my hairline to recede at the rightmost point. I think of how my skin sags and has lost a luster that I thought for sure was “me.”
Halfway through my enormous freshly ground cup and I’m thinking this:
The things I’ll write today!
The things I’ll write these next ten years!
I’m thinking how Mary Oliver wrote for decades.
I’m thinking, and it comes to me like a tilting sail in a zephyr, “I have NO IDEA what she looked like!”
And so, just in time, my coffee cup carries, to my full-enough lips, the feminist liberation I was waiting for.
CATSIT
My little lunatic
Perpetual pebble in my sock
WHY ARE YOU MEOWING? Do you even know?
I have given you everything. EVERYTHING.
Maybe I know what-you-want-to-see. Is-it-snow?
What you seek is the great beyond.
Well, we all seek that, dumb-dumb.
“That cottage of darkness.”
But curiosity won’t kill you because it is not your time.
To everything a season and today’s season is you stay in the apartment and don’t know anything.
Tomorrow’s season will be here. And fast.
You’ll know everything then.
So be patient!
So be quiet!
Being Mary Oliver
It’s… kind of an oxymoron — the bestselling poet. The ambitious, prolific poet. It’s… like being the most in-demand party clown — called across the region to play your kazoo.
How does that work? To be a famous poet? How does anyone do something so small and personal so loud and bold?
If I could figure this out, I could finally move on to some more interesting question.
and that… would be…?
Pss Pss
I think prayer
smells like:
A kiss on the pressed whisker of a cat who has just eaten fish. Her mouth is closed so the fish smell is just a salty life and her breath is clean.
I’m not a “cat person,” but I am a “kissing a cat person.”
A just-fed cat is a consummate snuggler. And, no doubt, she can smell the same is true of a just-fed Emma.
In short, we are well.
Quick Math Short Month
I used to be bothered I’m not Sondheim or Simone Biles.
But mightn’t they be bothered to not be me?
Or could no one be bothered? And just accept her own exquisite logic?
Because, when you live in this longing, you look up one day and it’s February and twenty days have passed since your last skyward pledge to be just and truly you.
And you do the math and see that a whole life can pass this way, trying to be someone “better,” who is necessarily someone else.
A series of small denials
make a facsimile of a person.
Even the very best of you may be something of a fiction.
Is it “settling” or is it “peace”?