As it is National Poetry Month, I figured I might as well share one of my favorite poems about cats, which describes Luna perfectly.

The cat’s song

BY MARGE PIERCY

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.

My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says

the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing

milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.

I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,

to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.

Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,

says the cat, although I am more equal than you.

Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?

Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.

My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.

My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings

walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally

as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.

I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg

and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Marge Piercy, “The cat’s song” from Mars & Her Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)

A week ago when I was doing some work from home, we had friends over. One of our friends brought their baby. Loki hid like normal, but Luna was very confused, and even looked panicked when I held him. Even though she was wary, though, she didn’t hiss or hunch of back or ruffle her fur. She just sat across the room, transfixed as I “cheated” on her.

A little while later, when I went down to my office to finish a transcription project, she followed me. Apparently, she was a little bit jealous that I was paying attention to someone other than her, so she got my attention the best way she knows how. By plopping herself right where I was working.

She spent the better part of the next hour rotating between sitting on my desk, crawling on my lap (on my wireless keyboard, and trying to throw various things OFF the desk and onto the floor. Including my computer mouse. Twice. But I love her. Just like any crazy cat lady, I love her.

Tag: poetry

feline friday “helps” work

The cat’s song