DAVE
Scott Jorgensen over at Base Camp posted a very affecting valediction to his cat Lewis a short while back. My cat Dave died last year & much of what Scott said expressed my own feelings at the time.
I am not a doglover. I have a hard time in the company of those who kneel in front of their labradors, grip their ears & then croon endearments into the fog of halitosis & sputum that passes for reciprocation. Any creature with a fixation on the arses & waste products of its peers seems fatally flawed to me. Hysteria, immoderation, servile dependency & the baffling conviction that shagging your leg is going to enhance an already shaky relationship - these are the main characteristics that I perceive in dogs. What alarming needs & insecurities plague us that they can be satisfied by these suffocatingly devoted beasts?
Cats are not owned animals. They indulge their human housemates, tolerating their presence in the territory, even bestowing a languid affection on them, such as one might feel for a favourite chair or an old overcoat. But for me the most important aspect of cats by far is that sense of their having an inner life, an existential dimension that cannot be nourished by human domestic comforts alone. They go off on their own, slipping into some parallel universe in which mysteries beyond our understanding prevail. Even when they sit on rug or windowsill, ostensibly sharing the family hearth, there is a sense of removal, the contemplation of that which we cannot begin to comprehend.
Shortly after Dave died, I wrote a poem about him. I don't care much for animal poems. Too often they seem to represent an attempt on the part of the omniscient human to penetrate the animal soul & thus speak with the creature's voice. This strikes me as an attempt to colonise the animal, to subdue it somehow & make it subject to our need to understand everything. So I don't really know where this one came from or why...
DAVE
The cat slept the day through,
a black sleep, coiled and dreamless,
dense and impenetrable. Here
was something too dark and still,
like at the tree’s heart, or earth
packed too thick around roots.
We watched from the doorway,
speculating, breathing slowly, waiting
for the stars to rise.
And that night my cat danced
for me, electric eyes alight
inside a twist of smoke. Here
was something whole and of
itself, abroad in a public world
but once from another place,
watched for the last time
from where the light shines
just outside the circle’s rim.
1:59:29 AM 
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