Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
I don’t know if it’s a sign of refinement, but our cats are picky about the water they drink. Puddles on the sidewalk, yes. Water from the front yard bird bath, yes. Water in a stainless-steel bowl?—yes to that too, but only on top of the refrigerator. If the bowl is sitting on the kitchen floor, then not at all, not even if the bowl was a platinum goblet created by the Greek God Hephaestus.
Hephaestus fashioned Achilles’ shield and a chariot to help Helios pull the sun across the sky, so if anyone could get it right, you’d think it would be him, but our cats wouldn’t drink from it. More like, What kind of nonsense do you think you’re tryin’ to pull? Now go out and get the bird bath, set it on the fridge, and fill it up with puddle water. Which is hard to do, of course, seeing as it’s mid-November. I mean, any water left over from the summer is frozen drips coiled up in the garden hose. Try reasoning with cats, though.
In A Book of Uncommon Prayer, Brian Doyle has this to say about them: “Look, Lord, You and I know they are a sneering supercilious arrogant species… happy only when eviscerating harmless tiny mammals… but there must be some redeeming virtues in them, or they would not have bloomed into being after You set the worlds to spin and the stars to burn; so with total confusion as to what conceivable virtue they might possess and with a smidgen of grudging admiration for their lithe athleticism… I offer thanks for whatever You had in mind there.” I suppose he might be right about some of that (eye of the beholder and all), but I think his confusion about their virtue can be explained by the fact that cats purr.
It isn’t clear to anyone—not to vets, not zoologists, not even crypto-biologists—why cats are born with this mystery-motor inside, but we have learned this: a cat’s purr can lower our blood pressure and strengthen our bones. How cool is that? Very much so. And it means we’re finally catching up to what an 18th-century poet already knew. I’m talking about Christopher Smart, locked up because he was a lunatic. Yet the poetry he wrote in the asylum was totally sane, especially the lines about his cat and companion, Jeoffrey:
For he is quickest to his mark of any creature…
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery…
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat…
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly…
For by stroking him I have found out electricity…
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good cat.
We’re coming up on Thanksgiving soon, when people take turns telling others what they’re thankful for, so I guess I’ll get that ritual rolling a little early: I’m thankful for the cats I’ve known.
And for mountain lions, lynx, and cheetahs.
And for snow leopards, silent on their mountain outcrops…
except for the purr.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo of snow leopard by Andrewfel, courtesy Shutterstock.
