Bogo de Claire
I want to talk about a cat, Bogo de Claire,
the one that lurked on the porch of the old house
when my mother
died. Its name was hers, Claire;
somehow it flew back on the plane and passed
through customs on either side of the border, but how?
What happened then I do not remember. Died or lost,
nothing comes to mind, except its name,
and who among us all can share the blame?
It was not used to Winnipeg winters with ice
that never melted, no place to catch a mouse.
Maybe it crept under the frame of the house next-door,
where the Indian boy would hide whenever he saw
someone with a bottle, grown-up who would give
him a hiding for no reason at all. Who would care
for these lonely creatures in the night, below zero?
Bodies were never found until spring melted
The layers of ice and dog poo and cigarette butts
And the liquor bottles tossed away in dreams.
Clipper the Dog
Then there was Clipper the dog, a piece of dirty
noise,
as we would say, but after I had left home
and when my mother died, my father went on walks
at night with the mangy-looking creature, out
for hours on the streets, something he never did;
it was the closest thing he ever got to confession
of loneliness. So far away I was
by then that the few words he wrote in his letters
made
no sense. A man walks the dog at night, after work,
and there’s no big deal in that. Only when he married
someone that was shocking and moved down south to
retire
did it seem odd, all of it, not like himself at all.
Clipper was named after Zipper, just as it began
as a response to someone else’s puppy, Buttons.
It makes no sense at first, all these little
changes in names and from life to death,
from things that make sense to those that never do.
Fish Tales
Pishu and ghotee were fish: play with letters
and you’ll see why. They lived in a little bowl
And went round and round all day, good friends
in a highly compressed world. At night, in the dark
they must have got up to unimaginable things:
more and more in the morning, we found them flapping
at either side of the room. Back they went
into the water, a seemingly content and pointless
pair.
But one morning they were both motionless on the rug,
Facing one another, their mouths open,
No longer gasping for breath and telling each other
secrets.
Silver Fish
Silver fish live in books, the most
learned of creatures, I am told, more
erudite than those who swim in schools;
they devour their lessons and give a toast
to authors of impeccable taste and roar
out their approbation yet ignore the rules
of etiquette when it comes to their excretia
Which they poo-poo at with mental gusto.
They would as soon poison you, like Lucrezia,
as vomit forth extraneous commas to
confuse the reader, full stop or merely breath,
so that conundrums end in solecism and death.
The Haunting of Fuffy
Fuffy and his family all had six fingers on their paws
Through some genetic mix-up, so the claws
Were that many times as vicious when Fuffy raged
And he did that often, though we couldn’t keep him
caged,
But gave him away, and he came back, sitting
in the bushes, glowering, and he always shitted
on our favourite plants at night. Once we caught
him and drove him far away to a shelter, bought
time, we thought, until someone would take him
further,
but wouldn’t you know it, less than a week later
Fuffy returned to haunt us day and night.
When the kind SPCA lady came he was out of sight.
She never heard of a family of six-toed felines
When we conjectured there was not just one but lines
Of Fuffies gathering from a hundred places to spook
our house,
Sending messages by twitter or a long-tailed mouse.
Conversations with a Doodle-Doo
White Fool was a silky who came to the window at dawn
and made a few hesitant noises and walked about before
he remembered me and came back again to try to wake
e up, the silly old bugger; and then I was drawn
into his game, slithered across the bedroom floor,
pushed aside the curtains, and whispered “You fake,
can’t you doodle-doo on your own? Toss me corn,
you stupid beast, then I’ll help.” The human scorn
didn’t make him go away. So I doodled: “New born
day has come, that’s your ancient refrain, so do it, Fool.”
He seemed to nod his cheeky jowls and wave
his comb with vigor and trumpeted his rave:
“Doodle-doodle-doo. Wake up children, school
awaits, and buses to the city, lazy moms
and dads. Kookarika-koo! No slave
am I to fashion. My reveille is global
and my duty being done, I twiddle my thumbs
and dance up to my wives, and being noble,
demand my grand reward—to bump their bums.”
After so many years I still remember
our conversations at the break of day, cock
and I, good friends to the very end of September,
when someone took him away to the chopping block.
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