MY FERAL KITTEN, RIPPLE

MY FERAL KITTEN, RIPPLE

Ninety days old, a triune of months, three

crescent moons of darkness in your eyes like daggers

plunged into the heart of the full

since you first opened them in the wild

and I encountered them on Facebook,

a daughter of Bast, looking for a home,

female, unneutered, seeded with fleas.

Did a fisher get your mother, your siblings?

I took you from the arms of a friend

who passed you on with your furnishings,

a new litter box with a cowling, two buckets

of cat gravel for a bathroom, a granary bag

of kitten food and your former name, Smokey,

because you were grey. A.k.a., Ripple,

after giving Wavelength some thought,

because you’re striped like the frequency of the rain

in a puddle of starmud. Growth rings in the heart

of an ironwood tree. And names have power.

Though I’m tempted now I know you a bit

to call you Bad Ass. But then you were scared,

fragile, trusting as I grasped you like a cloud

and put you on the passenger seat of the car,

all the windows up for fear you’d squeeze out

like a tube of toothpaste if I left them open even a crack.

You sat in the back windshield as I looked at you

in the rear view mirror watching everything pass,

and didn’t claw me to death in a mad panic

to return to everything you’d known. Gracias.

I’d lived with three goldfish and the sprites and goblins

of my imagination at three in the morning

awake in a deserted town for too long looking down

at unpeopled cement. I yearned for an affable familiar

I could touch among so many invisible things

mourning like a lonely train whistling into the distance.

A passing whim of synchronicity and you showed up

out of the wild, out of the ether, a hand warmer

on a cold night that had nothing to do with the weather,

a synteretic spark plug of life, a shepherd moon

in my planetary solitude, a comet of folly

in one long, endless, periodic sentence of life

bent hyperbolically like a hairpin around the sun.

Tinder box and straw. You go off like a firecracker

with whiskers, bounding down the hall

after a paper ball you trap in mid flight

like a fly to the outfield you claw from the air

like the first crescent of the moon in the window

waxing sure of itself. Your nerves are a bird net.

Your instincts haven’t had much of a chance

to serve you yet. You stalk tiny spiders in the bathtub.

You’ve won savage encounters with the toilet paper.

And you’re a torment greater than a spider mite

to the houseplants that don’t like playing

jungle with you as if you were training a bootcamp

to one day face the real thing like a potted plant.

I can box better than you, but in the first rounds

you got in some nasty cheap shots that drew blood

but now we’ve moved on to switchblades

and fangs like the syringes of a snake

that bite deep into the drumsticks of my thumbs,

you’re a ninja or a hashashin apprenticed

to the Old Man of the Mountain walking

like a voodoo doll down a path of needles and thorns.

You’re a cougar, a tiger, a lioness. Frenzied energy

a celebration of life to you, a fevered dance,

and there’s a big wilderness in such a tiny heart

you’re the lonely hunter and I’m always

this sickly wildebeest of a poet playing

the part of the prey come down to the watering hole

of the toilet in the heat of the day

like a missing link in the foodchain. If we

ever get out of here and move back to the farm

I’ll let you have one litter of cubs on the bedspread

just to say you did. I’ll let the root fires

burn in you awhile so your hormones

can blister in the mystery of birth without

the eternal sky shepherding the flight of the full moon.

You’re a fishing lure. Your cuteness hides the hook.

You focus like the Zen mistress of a spring-loaded,

four on the floor, rubber burning, stick shift about to explode,

only your tail, only that little nervous twitch in your tail,

a dead give away some fly at the windowpane

is about to get his like a terrorist from the karmic drone

of a cosmic cat goddess about to come down on it

like the Leonids wreaking havoc with the sabre and scythe

of the question mark that characterizes the radiant

in the the pyx and precincts of your sphinxy constellation.

Feline familiar, purr box, fur ball, burdock, velcro, spur,

Freddie Kruger with your switchblade fingers

doing needlepoint with porcupine quills,

you nuzzle up to me like a cloud around a mountain

and as often as you climb up, I bend down

to put my hand like a candelabra into a tree shredder.

If Kafka’s right, we all lie in the lap of a vast intelligence

but it doesn’t pet me the way I stroke you

as if I were first violin in a string band on a streetcorner

playing music on your melodic fur. And there were birds

with the fingers of surgeons perched on the staves

of your whiskers like semiquavers tickling the ivories

of your vertebrae like the keyboard of your spine.

You see the possibilities of hunting and fun in everything.

You’re not much of a knitter, and if you were a loom

I’d think you were a spider on acid, given what

I’ve seen you do with a ball of twine. But was there

ever a weaver who tied themselves up into so many knots

she needed an air traffic controller and a flight path

to land a flying carpet in the hall? Or grounded herself

like a bucket by a well entangled in morning glory vines?

You turn over on your belly, stretched out like toffee

and you’re white as a snowdrift someone

threw a scuttle of ashes on. Brave little creature

I love the way you take everything for granted

you depend upon when you’re not in the mood

to pander away your solitude for a medley

of chewy seafood treats. Wish I had

the same kind of hunting magic you do

or were half as charismatic as your iconoclastic voodoo.

You listen to a train in heat howling

like an alley-cat in the rain far across town

as your ears flare like distant echoes

of the Sydney Opera House with tufts of fur,

and then you look at me to see if there’s anything

to be afraid of, and I say, maybe later

but not right now. Better off scaring the fish

for awhile. Soon you’ll learn to burn and sting

and sing for yourself. Purring’s lyrical enough

for the moment. That hypnogogic mantra

you keep chanting to yourself like low thunder

on the event horizon of your strategic windowsill

your eyes half closed in Zen meditation

wholly at peace with all your afterlives,

enthroned in this, your latest incarnation.

Lady of Flame, Eye of Ra, daughter of Isis,

snake-killer, stone of alabaster, sister of the falcon,

spirit of the moon, protector of the sun.

Have you ever heard the purring of a human before?

I roll this poem into ball, throw it down the hall,

watch you leap for it, hang in the air a moment,

legs fully extended, a constellation, Orion, I think

just as it’s setting in the west twisting like a gymnast

to land on all fours like a gyroscope with coil springs.

I lay an osprey feather on your stairs. A medicine bag

stuffed like a scarecrow with catnip. My devotion.

My black leather office chair scourged

like a martyred flagellant by a cat o’ nine tails.

This red starmap of puncture wounds on my hands.

I name the third new moon of your lifemask, Ripple,

and by the fierce divinity of the first clean slash of light

that opens your eyes like sacred syllables

of yellow topaz in the night, no doubt, no doubt at all

in this man’s pantheon, whatever name I address you by

you’re the beautifully counter-intuitive cat goddess Bast.

Touchable amulet of the intangible mystery,

I stroke your skull like the belly of the Buddha

for joy in our prosperity, fire and ashes,

victory and defeat alike, the scythe and the wheat.

My hand glides like a lifeboat down the length of your spine

on an incoming tide. Your eyes close

like waning crescents of the moon as a seal of assent.

And for the moment I am wholly included

within their cosmic parentheses withdrawing

their lunar claws, gentling their staples

like the casual intrusion of feline sphinx music

into the tumultuous repertoire of my silence

listening in solitude to the evanescent stillness of the ages.

PATRICK WHITE