Like Clint Eastwood recovering from his wounds in a cave,
His blasted flesh made whole by hiddenness,
So that he may stride out into the open a mute hero;
Like a dragon hibernating with fire-breath turned down low,
Untouchable by savage chilvary;
Like Han Shan in ebullient meditation invisible on Cold Mountain;
Like King Arthur the Once and Future King waiting armoured
With untarnished mail in misty Avalon;
Like exiled excited Euripides writing on potshards persistent
In a tabula rasa cave far from his enemies;
Like Buddha in temporary eternity passively morphing evil arrows
Aimed at him into blossoms in zazen under the Bodhi tree;
Like crusty St. Jerome in his sand-encrusted desert study,
Alone with his loyal lion except for his learned malice;
Like the Seven Sleepers snoring safe for centuries in their den;
Like lots of hermits as rocky as their refuge nourished on locusts
And their lust for separation glutted—
As illustrious as these,
My cat needs to be secreted sometimes.
He seeks barricaded enigmas of solace we can’t understand.
He restores his elegant ambiguous vulnerability in the dust under my bed.
His valuable selfhood recuperates in the soft chaos of my closet.
Master of hiddenness, master of comfort among the uncomfortable—
He can stay in a paper bag for a day,
His magisterial tail unknowingly exposed.
He recovers himself but to give himself.
His aloofness makes possible his generosity; his solitude, solidarity.
He must re-incubate, re-consolidate.
He alone fulfills the desire to return to the womb
As he alone can rebirth himself.
He is a treasure that vanishes unless returned to its hiding place.
It must be returned, retrieved, returned again and again.
He isolates himself so that he may burst into visibility,
Expanding into our space,
Ready to present himself resurrected
As our palpable companion luminosity.
Then he will be my alien, un-alien twin,
Frenzied or lethargic as I am frenzied or lethargic,
Matching me in everything I do as much as he can.
His being will be rhyming with mine.
Thus the hero emerges healthier and more sociable than Lazarus,
Forgetting that he was ever entombed.
Purified by solitude,
He is able now to endure my caresses.
Only lightning will frighten him still,
Though he himself is lightning,
Even immobile under my bed.
© Stephen Margulies, 2017
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| Young cat hiding by 0XX010C on Wikimedia Commons |
1 comment:
Re: this particular poem--it is so easy to mistake obscurity for profundity and less of a fixation on cats would be helpful. Re: Live Poets as an enterprise-- an end to censoring, as of my previous comments here, would be welcome and most appropriate to a forum that could actually encourage the free and open exchange of ideas, but strangely limits itself to feel-good compliments. Such an approach is unlikely to advance the art of poetry or of honesty in general.
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