The cat I’m minding is disappointed with me.
I refuse to get out of bed at night
and prowl the rooms of my apartment with her.
Despite her calls, her encouragement,
her description of the smells and shapes
to be encountered in the soft dark spaces of night,
I turn my back, try to re-enter dreams.
She spends her days on my padded blue denim rug
by the window, where she can watch the birds
fashion-walk my balcony. She tells me
that this is her blue period,
that in her art of the serene, she has fashioned
a new level of calm, that even the prancing birds
with their cat-walk cockiness,
do not disturb her, that she has surpassed
living in the moment and now
the moment lives in her. I can tell
by the way her large eyes seem to shrink me,
by the way they give me to understand
I am in the presence of a goddess, that
she has truly reached a higher state of being.
I reach out to her head as she closes her eyes and
accepts my touch, lets me enter, lets me into the blue.
This is how it is to enter the mind of a cat.
is an Irish writer with four poetry collections published by Cinnamon Press (UK), most recently Lifting the Latch (2018). His work is widely published, including in Cyphers, Ink Sweat & Tears, London Magazine, Nimrod, Poetry Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and Rattle.
