.
Saturday night kitties loll about bathing
in milky blue flickering tv light and shade
as if it were not the end of the world after all
chimneysweep girl Dark Sister furiously
pecking at herself then abruptly pausing
to stare off into deep space quizzical while
Princey the great sleek black head potentate
laps daintily at his own snowy breastfur
and glances up through slit eyes sphinxlike
across the temple of the disinterested moment
at the advertised world apocalypse
in milky blue flickering tv light and shade
as if it were not the end of the world after all
chimneysweep girl Dark Sister furiously
pecking at herself then abruptly pausing
to stare off into deep space quizzical while
Princey the great sleek black head potentate
laps daintily at his own snowy breastfur
and glances up through slit eyes sphinxlike
across the temple of the disinterested moment
at the advertised world apocalypse
9/29/01
Six studies of a cat: Thomas Gainsborough, 1765-1770 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
4 comments:
You could not have described it better. Animals have a special power. I sometimes feel hypnotized to watch my pet's behaviour.
Incredible description Tom !!!
They do say so. I do not think I would disbelieve it ... :)
Thank you my friends.
Now these two are more of the Dear Departed: Dark Sister a wonderful feisty little tortoiseshell who hung out twenty-three years (!) before passing last spring; and Princey, or Little Prince a huge and hugely loveable black-and-white "Tuxedo", the heir to Prince Marcel who is memorialized in the post below.
(For any mad cat people who may be curious, there are little elegies for these two unique beings to be found in the Contents index: Happy Talk and The Great Sphinx.)
In the crazy time just after 9/1l when the human world had been stood on its end and seemed to be spinning out of control, late one evening I turned away from the menacing tv images to notice these two cats going through their fastidious Saturday night (well, every night) bathing rituals, and in that moment the order of living things in the universe seemed, somehow, to have clicked back into place.
I've always wanted to see the world through a cat's eyes...
...and here they are (with "look-alike" photos):
Happy Talk
The Great Sphinx
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