Les plus lus ▸
Ndrek Gjini
I am not the black cat.
There were four of us;
my grandmother,
a black cat,
a myth,
and I.
My grandmother often
told us a myth.
When you are ill, she said,
if a black cat
comes and sits on your bed
it means that you
will die soon.
I was only six,
seriously ill.
Our black cat
Poison ivy crawls at its root,
I dare not approach it,
It has an air of hate.
One would say a man had been hanged to its branches,
It holds them in such a way.
The moon gets tangled in it,
A distant steeple seems to bark
From its belfry to the sky.
Something that no one ever loved,
Is buried here:
Some grey shape of deadly hate,
Crawls on the back fence just beyond.
Now I remember--once I went
Out by night too near this oak,
And a red cat suddenly leapt
From the dark and clawed my face.
It’s raining.
Downspouts gargle furiously
around frogs of ice.
The barn cat listens & licks her pregnant belly.
It’s raining, the first warm rain of spring.
Sap rises, & the green nibs
where bulbs will write
their deathless names in the air.
It’s raining, it’s pouring.
Worms poke through the muddy ruins
of once-grand palaces of frost.
It’s raining.
Under the bark of a log,
the ant queen resumes her slow march.
the sound of a cat’s foot
like the ground in flight
a little fire whispering up
the bat in the church
so light a wing to polish
the bone of the ear
like a king not able
to whip a cat
so is my life
with the clock
melancholy rain
like a letter from a cave
what is the cat seeing at night
she holds up her head
All day a cat and the snow
by themselves
were merry.
Uncouth as a spaniel,
I work all afternoon at hope.
Pleasure me.
Let out the cat in my heart.
Ash overtook me, all joy
only a seed on the wind.
I went to the alley and bought a cat
and a good piece of cheese, I wonder why.
As if it is better to be here
than anywhere else.
first let go of the obscurer wildflowers
the quadratic formula
the plots of novels
you’ll never read again
it gets easier the less
you cling to things
do you need to know for example
how to make fire
or small talk
or change
the stomach forgets milk
feet forget the ground
eventually one surrenders
time itself
to the blur of eternity
a cat sleeping in the sun
Let me down one cat a time:
the cat that wakes me by sitting on my face
the cat that ignores me
the cat that pushes vases off of tables
the cat that was once magic but now just lies around and gets fat
the cat that kills birds out of irritation at their wings
and the cat that disappears in the middle of a sentence
like a body flung from a bridge while the soul
carries on, oblivious,
yowling about the goddamn hunter’s moon.
First an opossum crawls into our bed.
He’s tame, you cry.
Those are just love-bites.
Then it’s a long-haired white cat,
purring and snuggling.
Get her out of here, you groan.
I wake to a heavy snowfall,
the old dog statue in the yard
just a bump under the blanket.