Thoughts on a One-Eyed Cat
I know what is taking residence in an apartment
where a one-eyed cat seldom meows
reclusive brother, busy mother
leave him to be
like a shadow in the morning
he sits
at a fire escape listening
to blue jays,
sparrows,
starlings,
robins,
wood pigeons
who are singing in the pink
cherry trees
below
a stranger sleeping in his place
every morning
is new
birds have always been singing
a small black cat watches them
from a fire escape
a stranger watches him
from his place
on the bed
dressed monochrome in green, a woman, a mother, scrambles to find her keys. little cat chirps. smaller birds sing. a dawn’s soft light watercolors the walls peach. morning shadows rest on a teal couch. a rug’s color only knows to mimic dawn like a stranger only knows to watch an unfamiliar green-eye cat chirp at singing birds.
mimicry is always evidence of something more
dawn holds us all
four walls the same as yesterday
five paintings now wait at their base
a stranger will go home and sing to himself
four walls more familiar than yesterday
a window opens to invite air
assuage the breath
cool the toast
four breaths become a measure,
four walls; a room
four seasons; a return
four fingertips will be puppeteers to music
what blooms when four walls are familiar
like repeated breath allows for singing
in-and-out motion
like ancient divination
is fundamental
to all
between things
all the same things
become different
shift into something new
different
I have always been fascinated with the way in which repetition, of sound, or vowel, or melody, or consonance or rhythm create room for something unexpected. there is a space inside and between people from which art, music, poetry, or painting are conceived and born into the world. Audre Lorde has named it the erotic, others the duende or “what it is,” and Morrison approaches it as her narrator—yet it remains ineffable. Liminality is ever-present—forever in the dark where God’s imagination takes root and becomes
flesh
a shadow cast is evidence of something more
visceral
residing within
between
each of us expressed
a finger’s tender press
a guitar silk string—
it asks
“what is Shadow to a cave? what is Night to the universe? Dreams to imagination? Or black to the Womb?”
listening to the music of another’s tongue is a meiosis.
an absorption
syntax
pitch
timbre
tone
at home in the bones
a conversation is history
animated through every moment
forward
