A cat curled into a clock

26 August 2022
Unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən land

Dear Poemgranates,

I write sitting by an open window and I bristle. I keep time — the cat curled into a clock is purring in his sleep. The open window awaits a second cat. I write to you from a place of rhythm. Was it Gertrude Stein who noted the rhythm of her dogs drinking water? She followed that rhythm to an understanding of sentences and paragraphs, and then to a poem. In the rhythm of waiting for animals, I find myself unwilling to unsettle the cat sleeping on my lap, unwilling to startle the nesting blackbird in a poem. Seamus Heaney writes of St. Kevin, “…now he must hold his hand / Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks / Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.” Now I must write you a letter.

This week, I picked up Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind and I open its pages slowly so I do not startle the animals in them. I wonder if perhaps Limón wrote too in the stillness of not startling an animal, breaking lines off to make space for coiled beast and turning her voltas gently around a sleeping one. In the opening poem, Limón writes of a groundhog thieving her tomatoes: “She is a funny creature and earnest, / and she is doing what she can to survive.” I strive for such generosity in my writing, such abundance as to welcome foraging animals roaming the lines. And I strive never to startle. Perhaps the animal in a poem is a rhythm home among other rhythms. In “Litany for the Animals Who Run from Me,” Hieu Minh Nguyen writes, “I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls / when I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches / lift.” What I am saying is, I could follow that rhythm to stillness. 

Ever yours,
ALHS