Harper, my house manager and also a cat, ingested something so irresistible this past week and yet the immediate threat to one of her nine lives seemed inconsequential to her. Ole murder mitts is able to skewer anything that comes her way but whether it was the new catnip or the fly that sailed into the living room - brazen, dumb and ultimately skewered - it was impossible to know. Watching a being you love become uncontrollably sick is a heart wrenching reminder that nothing is promised. Will we all reach tomorrow morning? I hope so. In the dead of night, as I scrambled to get the best support for her, I wondered in that moment if my pet could speak, what would she say?
Possibly : It was worth it. Feed me more!
And so with the pause of a whisker, we make it to :
Writing Challenge #9 and #10.
Choose a moment from your day and write it from the perspective of your pet. Make sure to develop the intimacies of their perspective. And their voice, what does it sound like? Lean in.
I am grateful for those who helped me translate her voice this week and helped heal her. Later, when things settled, I felt my heart steady among the poetry shelves of the local library. anchored in place by the presence of Louise Gluck, Poems 1962 - 2020. I opened the book on the poem below and I felt comforted as I settled within the reality of impermanence glaring me in the face. Also that day I found none of the living donors had worked out. And then the cat threw up for hours and lived.
How do you feel about the poem below? Please send me a poem that you love!
Vita Nova
BY LOUISE GLÜCK
You saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.
When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.
I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.
Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.
Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes
and then unused, buried.
Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—
as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—
By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.
"Vita Nova" from Vita Nova by Louise Glück. Copyright © 1999 by Louise Glück. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Vita Nova (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1999) via PoetryFoundation.org