It takes them two weeks to sort out their spots.
The best ones range from dark recesses
on storage racks in vicarious closets
to lairs on chairs pulled up to dining tables,
all ideal for deep sleeping.
Others are matter-of-factly arrived at
to bolster circumstantial comfort
& offhand napping. Their formal posts,
overt perches & steadfast bastions
are deliberately selected & tenaciously defended
to facilitate maximum cosmic observation.
Between naps, just because they are
the way they are, they feel they’re not
allowed to know what they know,
so they watch & wait. With no timetable
beyond meals & brushings, easily outlasting
crossword conundrums, stray mice,
Miles Davis solos, Mahler symphonies,
street sirens, multiple pitching changes,
CSI reruns, coffee grinders, treat packet crackling,
odd hallway footfalls, plump robins basking
in birdbaths & the cows coming home.
Perspective-by-incongruity carries on.
Like cats, we once had more space to dream
than we can remember having now.
But cat thoughts aren’t limited by logic,
like those of humans: we lick at kindness,
never realizing its taste. Forever trying
to get out of it instead of just getting it.
But choosing to go on anyway, because we seem
to hold on because of them. I mean, if I
could pick you up & hold you, maybe we’d arrive at this.
Could we at least learn that much from them?
Bill Howell’s sixth collection is The Way Things Are at the Moment. He has recent work in CV2, Literary Review of Canada, Queen’s Quarterly, and Stand. Bill lives in Toronto.
Questions and Answers
How/where do you find inspiration today?
These days there’s a plethora of shoulds to navigate, and a bombardment of erroneous nonsense. Most experience we receive is second-to-fourth-hand: we’re forever being told what to think and feel. If you wait around to be inspired, the world will pass you by. And the older we get, the more disappointed with the world we become.
But if you keep looking, the abnormal always seems to draw attention to itself. Even suspended moments have events tied to them, and you’re the one who gets to discover and put them in a useful order. So writing poetry is a lot like being a ringmaster of the baroque, the neurotic, and the exotic.
This doesn’t happen without effort, and often the work itself becomes your inspiration. Sometimes the most benign situations and instances reveal themselves as worth exploring with further questions. After you ask what’s going on here, move on to okay but what’s really going on?
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
Cat poems are incredibly pervasive. Aphorisms reflecting on them abound through the centuries. Writers continue to adore the creatures, but coming up with something worthwhile to say is no less than a challenge.
We’d had two cats over the years, and lost the last one recently. So when a neighbour asked us to babysit her pair for a couple of months, we were glad to let them into our lives. Letting them in meant opening things up beyond merely taking care of their mechanics of living. We patted, chatted, and played with them, and in the process came to a whole new understanding.
I love to discover things through writing because there’s a lot I don’t know. How could I use this to explore these guys? I noticed there are plenty of poems about how cats run the world, but very few about how we need them to hang around.
Watching them watch us, I started to make lists. One of my mentors, novelist Ernest Buckler, once advised: “You can’t just make a list, and put things down as they are. You have to spell things out in a way that transmutes and transforms the experience of listing.” So itemizing isn’t enough.
What if I still did the listing, but from a cat’s perspective? Once I got to that, the whole piece came alive and grew into itself.