John Ashbery had just died at a ripe old age,
And I imagined who might now be saying
Somewhere, as Yeats had done, "now I'm
The king of the cats." Not me, certainly,
One of the mice perhaps, not even a duke
Of the rats. Like the eleven-year old dog
Gasping on a pallet at the neighbor's, like
The huge and wonderful cat used to patrol
Wendy's back garden by the glorified shed
With a bed she still calls the Château, I was
Short of breath and in no inconsiderable
Discomfort. The trap that catches a mouse
Is the mouse. Or the dog, the poet, the cat.
I sat outside and listened to Wendy's creek
While daughter played, shrieked, harvested,
And eventually settled down in another shed
Nicknamed the Caravan to watch a kid's flick
With three other kids, all piled on a futon
And watching scenes projected on the wall.
I should have been swimming. I should have
Been already, like so many, long dead. I
Kept breathing, heavily, anyway, thinking
Of sitting around Bruce Bigley's dining table
In Missoula thirty years ago, five or six of us
Reading "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
For our seminar on the longer lyric.
What was it had entranced me at the time?
Perhaps nothing so much as the ambition
Of the thing, the scale of a cat king trapped
In being a cat as seen by me trapped
In being something more like a mouse.
An actual heather vole, "imposter mouse,"
Flicked across a corner of my field of vision.
One of us will outlast the other this winter,
But I couldn't give you good odds on which one.
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