began to run, whinnying shrill, and then Cass, and Philly, and all the rest, the whole bunch, cantering first and then running flat out, running wild, racing, heading for Horse Camp and the Long Pasture, for Meredy and the long evening standing in the fenced field, in the sweet dry grass, in the fetlock-shallow water of the home creek
(1986)
Four Cat Poems
/ have a dream farm which I visit at need, to go around stocking the bams, yards, and pastures. The first livestock I bring in is usually a Jersey cow and three or four sheep-Jacobs, maybe. A donkey or two. A couple of riding horses -- now the farm enlarges and grows woods, hills, long trails... And, if only somebody wanted to work them, you can't just have them standing around, but oh, a pair of Shires! to see forged
for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
Sometimes a llama. Several llamas. Rabbits. Or a whole acre, fenced carefully, of guinea pigs.
Dogs, of course. Yard dogs. Large dogs. Nothing small that yaps. Large, lean, lazy deerhounds. Have to pull ticks off long soft ears while hound looks mournful. A standard poodle, most kind and courteous being. A big red chow dog Tao dog But listen, you dogs, if you don't treat the cats right, you're out. Understand?
All cats are balloons. All cats are petunias. All cats are mangold-wurzels. All cats are yin enough. All cats guide me.
M
tfj&fjiBm
151
Tabby Lorenzo
The small cat smells of bitter rue and autumn night His ears are scarred.
His dark footpads are like hard flowers.
On my knee he rests entirely trusting and entirely strange, a messenger to all indoors from the gardens of danger.
Black Leonard in Negative Space
All that surrounds the cat is not the cat, is all that is not the cat, is all, is everything, except the animal. It will rejoin without a seam
when he is dead. To know that no-space is to know what he does not, that time is space for love and pain. He does not need to know it
(1984)
Four Cat Poems -153 A Conversation with a Silence What kept you out so late my love?
I was running, I was running in the dark.
Dawn and raining when you came home.
The trees are clouds and roads to me. I run the sweet dirt-darkness in the rain and up where leafy chirping sleep-warmths nestle their blood for me. I meet my enemies below: the White One, the Singer.
What does your brother watch from the window?
Ghosts in the other garden.
I don't see ghosts. I go farther
along the cloud-roads
to kill where darkness branches in the rain.
(1986)
(1978)
154ABUFFALO GALS
For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson A black and white cat
on May grass waves his tail, suns his beHy among wallflowers.
I am reading a Chinese poet
called The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases.
The cat is aware of the writing of swallows on the white sky.
We are both old and doing what pleases us in the garden. Now I am writing
and the cat
is sleeping.
Whose poem is this?
IX
(1982)
"SchrOdinger's Cat" and "The Author of the Acacia Seeds"
"SchrOdinger's Cat" isn't exactly an animal story, except in this respect: The cat, which for Erwin Schro'dinger was a parable-cat, a figment-cat, the amusing embodiment of a daring hypothesis, enters the story as an actual, biagraphico-historical cat (his name was Laurel, and his visit during the writing of the story is described exactly as [during the time that] it occurred), and so changes the thought-experiment, and its results, profoundly. So it is a story about animal presence -- and absence.
So the real presence of an animal in a laboratory -- that is, an animal perceived by the experimenting scientist not as an object, nor as a subject in the sense of the word 'subject of the experi-menf (as in Nazi experiments in pain on human 'subjects'), but as a subject in the philosophical/grammatical sense of a sentient existence of the same order as the scientist's existence -- so such presence and perception in a laboratory where experiments are performed upon animals would profoundly change the nature, and probably the results, of the experiments.
'The Author of the Acacia Seeds" records the entirely fictional results of such 'subjectivism' carried rather farther than seems probable. It grew in part out of the arguments over the experiments in language acquisition by great apes (in which, of course, if the ape is not approached as a grammatical subject, failure of the experiment is guaranteed). Some linguists deny the capacity of apes to talk in quite the same spirit in which their intellectual forebears denied the capacity of women to think If these great men are threatened by Koko the gorilla speaking a little ASL, how would they feel reading a lab report written by the rat?
157
158 JT BUFFALO GALS Schrddingsr's
159
Schrcxiinger's Cat
AS THINGS APPEAR TO BE COMING TO SOME sort of climax I have withdrawn to this place. It is cooler here, and nothing moves fast
On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart She had pretty well gone to pieces, but he seemed, at first glance, quite
hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, she pulled herself together, and by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the toes of the right foot, approached us shouting, "Well what's wrong with a person trying to express themselves?" The left leg, the arms, and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and jerked in sympathy. "Great legs," the husband pointed out, looking at the slim ankle. "My wife has great legs."
A cat has arrived, interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow torn with white chest and paws. He has long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers about their eyes; is that normal? There is no way to tell. As he has gone to sleep on my knee, I shall proceed.
Where?
Nowhere, evidently. Yet the impulse to narrate remains. Many things are not worth doing but almost anything is worth telling In any case, I have a severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica, or Adam's Disease. It is incurable except by total decapitation. I even like to dream when
asleep, and to try and recall my dreams: it assures me that I haven't wasted seven or eight hours just lying there. Now here I am, lying here. Hard at it
Well, the couple I was telling you about finally broke up. The pieces of him trotted around bouncing and cheeping like little chicks, but she was finally reduced to nothing but a mass of nerves: rather like fine chicken- wire, in fact, but hopelessly tangled.
So I came on, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, and grieving This grief is with me still. I fear it is
