Cats
Some of you may have read via ephemera that my sister died last Wednesday.
She had bean getting progressively weaker and less able to live any kind of life, and the Marian we knew had been gradually fading for many months. But it will take a while to fully take in that she has really gone. I can remember her entire life.
She was an elective mute for many years, but spoke when she was with the family, and in recent years (ie the last 12 or so) the first word she would usually say when she arrived chez nous was "Midi" - (see picture above). The cat would come to see what visitor had arrived, and I would say "Who's that come to say hello to you?" (She needed prompting to start speaking); and she would beam and say "Midi!", with great delight in having remembered.
Anyway I've been lookijng for suitable readings for her funeral - and a lot are not at all appropriate for a learning disabled person - and tiggeros has found a lovely poem about memory and the resolve of the living based on a Jewish prayer.
But the same author also wrote this about cats - and the first section is just so true of Midi with her nightly "grape-treading".
So I thought I'd share it with you:
The Cat's Song
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.
She had bean getting progressively weaker and less able to live any kind of life, and the Marian we knew had been gradually fading for many months. But it will take a while to fully take in that she has really gone. I can remember her entire life.
She was an elective mute for many years, but spoke when she was with the family, and in recent years (ie the last 12 or so) the first word she would usually say when she arrived chez nous was "Midi" - (see picture above). The cat would come to see what visitor had arrived, and I would say "Who's that come to say hello to you?" (She needed prompting to start speaking); and she would beam and say "Midi!", with great delight in having remembered.
Anyway I've been lookijng for suitable readings for her funeral - and a lot are not at all appropriate for a learning disabled person - and tiggeros has found a lovely poem about memory and the resolve of the living based on a Jewish prayer.
But the same author also wrote this about cats - and the first section is just so true of Midi with her nightly "grape-treading".
So I thought I'd share it with you:
The Cat's Song
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.