| From the book The Wild Rose | Legends and Fantasies
(1976 - 1978) |  |
| The Cat’s Look | I
My beautiful cat, when you test the experience
and power of space at the window,
it’s as though within me they light a fire
and brandish in me a living, powerful censer.
I think that the world did not look at the ABC
and the miracle of literacy is in vain.
But when the assured creature is barely attentive
life is dangerous as a staircase,
when with contempt and a golden chalice
your look descends down the ramp,
and my heart falls before you
as before the servant of the Lord.
II
Now anguish visits you as in a mirror,
in the mirroring, chunky cut-glass goblet,
and I am the slave of your memories:
I lay out for them broad paths
in an emptying country, where one can avoid
gravitation like a closed house,
and the living temptation of weightlessness,
burning globes, almost silent.
So the best hours will concentrate us
on the tip of the needle of salvation,
where love is in torment, and where vision sinks
into a many-rippled diamond.
Life looks at life, destroying boundaries,
and all the eyes of your medusas
are just one injection, one anaesthetic of the fabric,
one suffering union.
III
Go on, my speech, with the pace of a cat,
(as though space itself had allowed itself
a forgotten game), be drunk among the sober
with a flame burning in the wind.
Carry your candle, like the cat does, without distrust,
as truth sees life when it is on its own: for the happiness
of intelligent powers, for the rapture of the beast
danger is bequeathed you. | | Richard McKane | |
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