The cat's clean careful mouth

by Carolyn Kizer

The Intruder

My mother -- preferring the strange to the tame:

Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,

Frog's belly distended with finny young,

Leave-mould wilderness, hare-bell, toadstool.

Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves,

Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all

Wild and natural! -- flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she

Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,

And held the little horror to the mirror, where

He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off.

Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing

Came clattering down like a small black shutter.

Still tranquil, she began, "It's rather sweet . . . ."
The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint

In the caught eyes. Then we saw,

And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow,

Nested within the wing-pits, cosily sucked and snoozed.

The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud,

Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth

Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor

Remained, of all my mother's tender, wounding passion

For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life

Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,

Whose denizens can turn upon the world

With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw,

To sting or soil benevolence, alien

As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot.

She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap,

She washed and washed the pity from her hands.

Summer near the River

I have carried my pillow to the windowsill

And try to sleep, with my damp arms crossed upon it, 

But no breeze stirs the tepid morning.

Only I stir. . . . Come, tease me a little!

With such cold passion, so little teasing play,

How long can we endure our life together?

No use.  I put on your long dressing-gown;

The untied sash trails over the dusty floor/

I kneel by the window, prop up your shaving mirror

And pluck my eyebrows.

I don't care if the robe slides open

Revealing a crescent of belly, a tan thigh.

I can accuse that non-existent breeze. . . .   

I am as monogamous as the North Star,

But I don't want you to know it.  You'd only take advantage.

While you are as fickle as spring sunlight.

All right. Sleep! The cat means more to you than I.

I can rouse you, but then you swagger out.

I glimpse you from the window, striding towards the river.

When you return, reeking of fish and beer,

There is salt dew in your hair.  Where have you been?

Your clothes weren't that wrinkled hours ago, when you left.

You couldn't have loved someone else, after loving me!

I sulk and sigh, dawdling by the window.

Later, when you hold me in your arms

It seems, for a moments, the river ceases flowing.

                                                                                     Themes from the Tzu Yeh Songs and  

                                                                                     the Mo-ch'ou Songs.

  

From Carolyn Kizer, Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984).