C) Cats, yes Cats

Glenn Miller died over the British channel, we think.  I wonder who he left behind, that was dear to him, I mean.  Say he had a cat…

 

       The stories keys could tell, the cold fingers they’d touched.  The blaze of rooms they’d seen, been meant to see, designed to see, but still never seen.  I think of all the rooms that I dream I was designed to see, but will probably never see.  My nights are filled with dreams of rooms, reeking of mulch and vinegar, I fumble at the lock and enter, small like a cat slipping through the flap, and the room is stubborn in its silence and then it LIGHTS UP!  A crowd shines along the distant wall and there is a show on stage and I rush to enter the spotlight, but cannot.  Some distant fear is blocking my stamina.  It hides in an old room with a cat in the sunlight…

 

... the Egyptians identified the lions that roamed around their lands with the Sun. They believed that at sunset, The Sun God Ra, would die and descend through the underworld in the West, to be born again in the East, at sunrise. During the night, however Ra was always in great danger, as his enemies, headed by the great serpent king Apophis could and would not hesitate to attack him, thus putting the whole Universe in danger.
However, the lions would look unto the setting sun, and keep its rays in their eyes. They have eyes that reflect in the dark. With that fire burning in their eyes, the lions would go forth and kill the serpents of the night…

 

XVI

Asleep in your lap like a cat.  There was a haze across the sun all day.  Yes, I still prefer her graceful catlike curves, than the alternative.  She comes in slack and dispirited.    Sometimes the vast enormity of life bears down on you so much that you can't hardly stand to open your damn eyes. Cruising out of Texas at 21 thousand feet feet everything is as far away as it will ever be. Look mom, no hands, the world just keeps spinning and spinning so dismissively impervious to our sad and pathetic interventions.

The world is scarlet and dust across the horizon beneath me.  I look up into the darker layers of blue and remember my cousin Bobby in high school.  A smart kid with a baseball cap for hair, constant inspired smile and cunning eyes.  The kind of face that warmed with a flash of light that made you believe that all this humanity someday would lead to something good.

It takes a great player to check upwards.  Gaze at the moon and stars next to the stadium lights and size up the whole equation in a moment before right action is made.  Catlike and supine.  Not spluttering around, gank the back and snick it off to first or third.  A double play.  A triple.  Let’s go home slugger.  Let’s go to bat and get us some ice cream, the night is young!

 

XIX

 

Our actions are like sounds, the closer you are the more profound the vibration.               Back when I was young, before I wore this mask, or any other for that matter (Everybody wants you to be just like them) “you kiss a beautiful mouth and a key turns in the lock of your fear.”   Got crabbies in his boxers, they teased, but even then I didn’t subscribe to any standard of what it means to be a man.

It takes a great player to check upwards.  Gaze at the moon and stars next to the sea, bedding hipster missus and listening to the low waves lapping along the shore.  Not merely far apart and lallation, mewl like an infant and plumb to the floor and sky, the whole darn cosmos waving about.  Hitler hearing that Russia is lost.  Anyone can experience ire at the hands of their own Karma.  Anyone can cry and become riled.  But it takes a great player to immerse into cosmic apprehensiveness and force something like that to come off successful.

Glenn Miller had a cat named Staccato, who was there for the Battle of Britain, sitting under the blackout window shade and watching London burn in stoic cat poised wisdom, as the bandleader practiced in the den, slept alone or with players.  White, soft and warm, like the notes he arranged onto the airwaves of the world to remind them of a time before all this fire.  A Big Band with a gentle touch, like a cat brushing across your knee and quickly walking off into the warmth of the night, disinterested in anything further you could have to offer.

XXI

 

Life is full of mysteries.  There are shades of God in everything, but why can’t we part those shades?  What are they made of?  Maybe they are made of language.  What is a cat’s perception of God?  Do cats believe in God?  Do they have to?  Living your life in a state of sleepy contentment between meals may not even necessitate preponderance of the question.  Does that make God any less real?

 

Perhaps there is no black and white.  Just definite objects associated with colours.

 

The color I remember was brown.  It was a party at Bobby’s house.  Someone’s birthday or graduation.  I had drunk too much.  Snuck wine from the aunties, and smoke from the friend, and spent too much time bored and gazing excessively into the long day sun.

            Their house was on a dirt road where there was never any traffic, and the men took their leave after the feast to shoot their guns and grunt.  I followed, and tossed a Frisbee to the little ones.  The Frisbee flew askew into a shed across the way.  Weed-choked, windswept and abandoned.  Grey, like all the old sheds are grey, and with that chilling temperatured differential between light and shadow.  The light is life, and into the shadow there is a drop off into the darkness of neglect, the smell of old time.

 

A cat came out.

 

            “Oh that old cat,” said my uncle, “I hate that little fucker.  Come here Fucker.”  And the cat came and took obeisance, bowed and made its leave. 

            “Why?” I ask.

            “Why what?”

            “Why do you hate it?”

            “Oh we’ve got so many.  This one’s just so absorbed, you know.  I could throw it across the road into the river and maybe it’d never come back.  That’d be okay.”

 

        My uncle is a sympathetic man.  Undamaged by time, not like my mother’s uncles who have something reptilian in their eyes that we hope one day will evolve into something proto-human before their demise.  My uncle is a nice man.  But I didn’t catch the gleam of, (was it sarcasm?) … in his voice. 

 

A popular concept amongst Egyptian women seems to have been that the ideal beauty was that of a cat.  The make-up they used accentuated particular features, especially the eyes, which gave them a mysterious cat-like look.  

 

     The cat snarled in the jungle, an enormous hideous beast.  A threat to all mankind.  I reach down and hold the squirming incubus and cannot fathom how it holds such power to transport us through dead terminals. 

            "Watcha doin?"

          “I’ll take care of this cat for ya,” I say.  I practice my throwing motion, like a bowler with a feral fur ball scratching at his wrist.  I wind up.  I heave, I hurl.  The cat

goes flying

 up

 into the air…

 

 

                                                        … down not at all gracefully.  There are sounds of breaking.  She is an old cat, she does not want to go in the river.  My cousins and my uncle stare incredulous. 

        "Jesus boy, I was just kiddin’"

XXVI

Regrettably there are worse things waiting. If you make it big you can sell it.  This fear of mine.

There were beautiful women who wrote on floats in the parade, waving bejeweled hands before a processional of tanks and fighters.  Perhaps somewhere in my psyche I still equate the two.

It’s a funny thing about keys.  We lose them all the time.  They slip behind the cracks and doors are lost to us forever, unless we break through them with force, which, honestly, who wants to do?

Inside, there is a cat.  How did it get here?  And why do I suddenly think of Glenn Miller, some distant reverberation coloured only with black and white.  The cat smiles, happy to see me, rubs against my legs a few times, and struts mysteriously away.