Downpipe cat & Monkeys
by Nicholas Messenger
[ poetry - february 07 ]
Downpipe cat
The cat you want is not the one you get you know.
Seiko saw one shinning down the drain pipe
to the ground. Eleven stories head-first. No
tail; no fear either I suppose. It isn't any bigger than a slipper
but of nights it has a deep yowl like the first bite
of a hack-saw, and it roams the roof-heights begging for another soul:
another cat, a pigeon, an abandoned paper
or the whole wind to befriend it. Seiko has begun to laugh
at it, which is the start of love. She has begun to hold
its unapproachableness precious. She is growing a little like it.
She can imitate its voice so accurately that their spirits must be half
in harmony already. And I've seen her shimmy down a climbing rope
with that insouciance. To watch them on the stairway strike
their wary poses off each other, is to see hearts haggling over hope.
Monkeys
The monkeys sit in rain. There is an arrangement
between Yakushima and the ocean wind, that somewhere
once a day, if not all day and if not everywhere,
it rains. On sagging branches and in futile nests
of shrivelled fern no instinct usefully suggests;
on roadsides with the water dribbling round their bums,
they squat, resigned, with ages-old bedraggled
resignation. From this window late
cars straggle
through the heavily-descending streetlight, strangely
emptying the road and closing houses. And nobody comes
to call into my room, while there is laughter behind other
doors along the hall. Small faces
scrunched up
in that look of idiocy shared by wise men lost
in worthy cogitation and, of course, their brother
idiots. What wisdom are they mulling over? Just
that soon they are going to have to get up and find leaves to munch.
