Winged cats exist.
Must exist!
Sublimely promiscuous,
They can’t not exist!
They don’t regard difference
Between earth, air, and light.
Borne up by silliness,
By faith, by similitude,
By their analogy to any shape,
They are lazily limitless
And may further their fur
Into petal or wings
Pluming through fable.
If winged cats don’t exist,
Clouds won’t blossom,
Grass won’t be kissed,
Water won’t be gardened,
And rocks, once curvaceous,
Will refuse affection.
Fire won’t be sinuous
If winged cats can’t exist.
Thoreau thoroughly knows
Winged cats must exist,
Uplifted by the hybrid
Serene weddings of wildness.
Furry wings are allowed
A unique perfume:
Earth, air and light insist
This trespass is wisdom.
© Stephen Margulies, 2014
 |
| Cat Graffiti in Prishtina Photo by WikiPri from Wikimedia Commons |
7 comments:
What a fast ride through fun and wonderful words!
Love this reshaping of "reality." I do wonder what the Thoreau reference refers to...
Bill V.
Wonderful, Stephen! Furry wings!
Obscurity is too easily mistaken for profundity.
Pray tell, previous commenters, what is wonderful about this poem?
Do you have any idea what it means, or do you even care if it has any discernible meaning? Please advise this hopelessly dull-witted reader what he is missing.
Have you considered the possibility that all of us are being pranked by Stephen? Maybe that is the only humor in all this.
Bill V, the "winged cat" reference is in Walden, and the wings on the original cat were clumps of matted hair attached to its sides:
"Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a "winged cat" in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker's. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her "wings," which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?"
Thoreau's flight of fancy in the last sentence really stands out to a cat lover/poet. The naturalist in me (who knows there are no real domestic cat/marten hybrids) had to find out what was really up, so check out this link! (be warned, though, the farther down you scroll the weirder stuff gets):
http://messybeast.com/winged-cats.htm
Laura
That Thoreau fancifully referred to winged cats--notice that he encloses "wings" in quotes--does not rescue this poem from ragbag obscurantism. Again I ask, does this poem say/mean anything at all or is it simply a verbal romp by a writer who does not seem to care if it is intelligible? Just what is "sublimely promiscuous," or "lazily limitless,' or curvaceous rocks" that do not "accept affection"? Readers who like this poem might want to consult Billy Collins' "Workshop" poem, which flays such language that appears to show off far more than it shows.
I haven't talked with Stephen about this poem, but it doesn't seem especially difficult to understand.
Pegasus, the winged horse, has long been a symbol of poetic imagination--and by extension, artistic imagination in general. A winged horse isn't confined by the fences of familiarity, or bound to the ground of day-to-day living and thinking. It represents the freedom and pleasure of creativity, which can move back and forth between ordinary reality and the realm of the imagination. It allows us to dream of such illogical and improbable creations as a boy who climbs a beanstalk to a castle above the earth. It gives us Paul Bunyan and Babe, his Blue Ox. It gives us Keats' Grecian urn and most of Blake's poetry. It gives us Salvador Dali's drooping clocks, and Edward Hopper's melancholy scenes.
What Stephen has done is something simple yet unique. He has substituted his favorite animal, a cat, for the horse as a symbol of unfettered artistic range, and then offers the fantastic pairings that follow as samples of things you’ll be unable to entertain if you don’t free your creativity and imaginative capacity enough to allow the idea of winged cats.
Yes, the poem is playful with language, yes the poem is extravagant in its examples, and “verbal romp” is an apt description. I think of a romp as exuberant, letting go and having fun. Lighten up and spread your wings!
Post a Comment