Cats Gone By: Guilty Parties
Cats Gone By: Guilty Parties
Lorenzo
Seymour
Bucky and Louis
Bucky at Eighteen
This spot by the register is a favorite with all the elderly kitties. They push up against the metal, and nod off.
I was looking though an old photo album for art subjects. These pics are from the ’90s. My gang of white cats (I once had five) are all gone now, most having lived to the age of nineteen. Lorenzo, the Maine Coon, used to sleep wrapped around the table leg like that. Seymour is peering over the hanging basket, tiny Bucky and cerebral Louis are the bag breachers. Lou was such a smart kitty, who seemed always short of achieving cat Zen because he tried to figure things out, to communicate, and sat clearly waiting to see results….had he made himself understood about the refrigerator?
Bucky was a perfect sweetie, so utterly at peace with the world, that he almost went into suspended animation at the end of his life, like the music master in Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. Lorenzo was a great attention-seeker, holding his little arms up to be held and hugged…and Seymour had a habit of turning up in photos, watching from the background.
Dexter
I like to capture the orneriness, when I sketch a cat.
In Memoriam: Gretel cat
Caught Alone
Loved one, they gather on the stairs
The passageway is closed
The door will jar against a darting shape
Unnoticed, their kind, snuffed in the daily cataclysm
One will tear the fabric
Go
She is standing in the kitchen of her mother’s house
Caught alone
Under the popeyed voyeur’s thumb
She hears disjointed blurbs of speech
They come two or three times
Over the telephone’s open line
A mind like a termite nest
Chopped in the blender of cultish whispers
Reassembled in the conqueror’s chalice
A tumor of lard
Finds this valedictory declining fuss
Heartbreaking, stirring, condemnatory, just
The mockery of solemn things is more than
She can understand
O, the battery, the battery is dying
Its tiny voice is piteously crying
Syllables of digital diddly-hoo
A mylar balloon is flying, loosed
From the used car lot where once it bobbed
“For sale”—for nothing—“There it goes”
Loved one, in this room, they’ve laid a sash cord
And the window is unlatched
Others lionized in death
Trembled here to heal the wayworn breach
(2016, Stephanie Foster)