The cat falls
over on the kitchen table
after pushing into
a purse, a box of cards, the cover
of a laptop. Everything
she tries to rub
alive and convince
the genie inside to grant
her the single favor
of a scratch on the jaw
collapses
inert before slipping out
from under her
rapacious reach. Continue reading “The Dry Taste”
Tag: cat
Happy 100 Days: 25
“Mommy, do you know Mozart?”
I am pouring oats into the boiling water. “The cat or the musician?” Our long-ago pet’s musical mrawr? earned her the moniker of the great composer. The resident felines ran her off when we moved here in 2010. Bug only remembers the cat from stories and pictures.
“The musician,” he says.
“I’ve heard of the guy.” Stuffing the snack in his backpack, I tick off my mental list of tasks. The clock is inching towards 7:45. The pan on the stove is beginning to froth.
“Did you know,” Bug says, “that Mozart wrote all those songs when he was so young?”
“Yeah? Tell me.” Stirring in the brown sugar.
“And do you know Beethoven? What’s so funny?” He starts to chuckle. “He couldn’t even hear the songs while he was playing them!”
I am so in love with this county’s schools. “Did you know,” I say, “that I was listening to Mozart just last night while I was making the beef stew for dinner?”
“You were?”
“Yup. And there is a CD right over there in Grandma’s CD player that is all Mozart.”
Bug’s eyes widen. “Really?” He slips down from the table and turns on the player. He starts to scroll through the tracks. I finish pouring the hot oatmeal into a container for the car. He listens to bits, chords, the opening swell of Eine Kleine Nachtmusic then moves on. I gather drinks and school bags and keys.
Bug stops at a piano concerto and waits. Suddenly, he bounces up on his toes. “I know this song! I know it!” He lets his hands fall on top of the CD player and he peers into, listening hard. I seize this chance to spray the rat’s nest at the back of his head with detangler and work through the golden knot with a brush. He barely registers my presence. The notes rain down around us.
Halfway through the piece, Bug hits the back button so it begins again. He glances up at me as I shrug into my coat. “I know this one, Mommy,” he says again. His eyes are sober.
“Yes, baby. You do. That’s your song right there.” For a moment, we are both still.
Listen well, kiddo. Keep those ears open. Every song is yours. Every lyric, every splash of color, every rusted cannon, every story. The departed ones passed through this place in a breath and left nothing but their bits and strains. Except for a few, most of the names are gone, too. Now, it is yours. All this world, for you.
—
The other Mozart:
The Seventh Life
She begins to cry sometime after midnight.
Each howl a round, dry bottle
she casts over the water
only to watch it sink.
No buoyancy at all,
just the cool ink where it fell
silent, still.
In this house of warm flesh
every door is shut. Even her nemesis
is out of reach
closing in on a doe,
a black comma
on a pallet under a coat of winter wool.
She didn’t do this before. Never in her many years
has she wandered the house, pleading,
the inflection cresting at the end of the cry
a sustained note,
a hooked interrogative
dredging my drowned body
from the depths.
I would invite her in (I claim)
but never have, not once.
She kneads the soft places
with her claws.
It doesn’t so much hurt
as scrape the edge of desperation
and beg for a way back in.
There is no vacancy
in this fallow womb.
Even though she presses her longing
against the spars,
the sea of my heart does not surge
and my breast is parched.
She will have to let the light from distant stars
in through the portholes
of her eyes
and seek refuge
in its inadequate warmth
as we all do.
Shannon E. Williams 