Quand Milo était un châton

Le poème raconte le comportemant extravagant d'un chat. Milo, qui est redevenu un chat sauvage durant trois heures... la vétérinaire dit que c'est un "havana brown .... les yeux jaunes, la voix, l'esprit vif qui joue grave le sérieux et n'apprendra pas la rectitude par la bonté", mais non se ravise-t-elle "c'est une ancienne race sans nom — 

Fourrure de vison dit-il et je réponds en chat.

Quand bien même

je ne serais pas né dans une benne à ordures

entre un chou moisi et un bout de pain périmé

j'ai aussi été secouru par une femme extravagante."

 

Lu sur Poem a day ce jour. Le poème s'intitule For Katy, par Rodney Jones

 

When Milo was a kitten
and spent the night
with us in the big bed,
curled like a brown sock
at our feet, he would
wake before daybreak,
squeak plaintively
in his best Burmese,
cat-castrato soprano,
and make bread on our stomachs
until if one of us did not rise,
sleep-walk to the kitchen
and open his can of food,
he would steal under the covers,
crouch, run hard at us,
jam his head
in our armpits,
and burrow fiercely.

 

 

Probably he meant nothing by that.
Or he meant it in cat-contrary,
just as he did not intend
drawing blood the day
he bolted out the door
and was wild again
for nearly three hours.
I could not catch him
until I knelt, wormed
into the crawl-space
under a neighbor house
and lured him home
with bits of dried fish.

 

Or he meant exactly what he smelled,
and smelled the future
as it transmogrified out of the past,
for he is, if not an olfactory
clairvoyant,
a highly nuanced cat—
an undoer of complicated knots,
who tricks cabinets,
who lives to upend tall
glasses of Merlot.
With his whole body,
he has censored the finest passages of Moby-Dick.
He has silenced Beethoven with one paw.
He has leapt three and a half feet
from the table by the wall
and pulled down
your favorite print by Miró.
He does not know the word no.

 

When you asked the vet what
kind of cat it was, she went
into the next room
came back and said,
“Havana Brown.”

 

The yellow eyes, the voice,
the live spirit that plays into dead seriousness
and will not be punished into goodness,
but no—

 

an ancient, nameless breed—

 

mink he says and I answer in cat.
Even if I was not
born in a dumpster
between a moldy cabbage
and an expired loaf of bread,
I too was rescued by an extravagant woman.

 

Comment : le nom du chat est Milo Delassize. Vous le verrez ici (il est très beau) :

https://www.facebook.com/pg/neworleanscat/posts/