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To Wonder is Feline.
Down the sidewalk, past centennial street,
A road I’ve come to know in nearly every light.
It is lined with familiar houses, with unfamiliar faces.
I know the house where one Saint Bernard lives.
Whose drooping lids and flappy flews know no lieu.
And the Samoyed, I know him too.
He lives in the house with the bright pillars,
As if colored in by children’s hands.
The years have gone, and I’ve daily past.
If they see me in grey, well, I see them like that too.
They cock their heads, and then dismiss.
As if to say, ‘Oh, it’s just you again.’
Finally I come to the point where the sidewalk ends,
The part where I turn around.
Just one more step,
And I’d be further away, than I have ever been.
One more step,
And I’d be doing something strange.
Between me and the stop sign,
Lays a mobile thing.
The grey tabby in my direction casts
A pair of yellow and blinking eyes
Going with speed, with no particular end in mind
It might be nice, I think to myself, to be a cat.
With no solid ties, no long goodbyes,
To anyone or anything.
Could I grow pointed ears and whiskered cheeks?
To travel along a breeze,
Binding the known, so long.
What would that be like?
I would not travel, by road or way.
But through open field or wooded plane,
That is the path I would take.
I’d take my hat, my journal, and my time.
I’d take a turn around every rock and every tree
Just to see what I would find.
Yet it is here that I turn, again to choose the same.
Perhaps, one day, I’ll follow.
Perhaps one day, I’ll bereave
But the sky is getting darker now,
And even cats do not wonder in the rain.
