I Love My Cat Poem by Linda Hepner

II love my young, sleek cat,
Black, and slippery, white nose, white paws
White chest, the whitest whiskers
And six toes splayed out like sneakers
Swiftly slithering
Along the parquet flooring,
Its leaps like papers
Hitting the sidewalk, its taps
Like paper falling from tables.

My cat’s called Figaro, a name
We innocently thought described his voice
Miowling in seven different languages,
Consisting of the vowels from a to y
And many diphthongs, all in tones
From middle C to screeching Bs
And treble Ds to basest Gs,
With modulations ranging mutely soft
To most imperious, feline fine fortissimo.

A clumsy clot’s my cat, and that’s a fact;
He leaps and misses ledges, knocks down plants,
He slithers in the bathtub, bounds up stairs
Like panthers on the loose, and then slides down;
He tackles tiny twigs and carries them
Like quarry, or he chases beads
Across the floorboards, cutting corners,
His triumph gleaming in his wet glass eyes,
His six toes splaying
While displaying, comic cat,
His polydactyl personality.

But let me here reiterate, I love my cat;
He winds himself around my neck, he purrs
Into my ear, he looks so luminously
At me with his shiny eyes like pebbles washed
By running streams, he waits for me
On window sills and rubs his silky, slinky coat
Against my skin and when he sleeps
He claims my lap or shoulders but if then
I've left the house, my hidden cupboards or my pillow:
Puss, my missing spouse.

LRH 3.28.10