Alan Gould: Two Poems

Chat with the Whitest Cat

Béyaz, you Mùscovite, bliss to your fùrs,

sprawled at our hearth with its coral chaleurs.

Cat, are you dreamy where dreams are rehearsals

Of cats in their snowdrifts all famished for morsels.

Cat, are your manners unique or sub-lunary?

You taproot in murder then tongue at your finery.

What’s season for cats? Can cattishness tremor

in catkins of springtime and catspaws of summer?

There’s brass in a samovar, brass in your manner,

I call you my pussy yet know you’re a loner

to trot in late summer when paddocks are stubble,

when evening has cherried the sun to a bauble,

and small birds must gossip while looting the orchard,

enigma that tears them—deep down are you wretched?

Is heaven of sentience triggered by glimmer,

not prey in its doombox, but prey-and-its tremor?

Behind your shut eyes are there cats will connect

with all that is white and a-flicker and licked.

Béyaz, you snowfield, here’s bliss to your pelt,

most white of your cosmos, both dealer and dealt.

Alan Gould

Ready or Not

Jump, jump, ready or not!

Your bro is in the doghouse,

your daddy is a nut.

Jump, jump, know you’re alive

both now and in nineteen fifty-five.

At some still point of ’50’s toddlerhood

I watched the agile fingers of Miss Wood

mint piano notes to flood our dour school hall,

then strew them tumbling in their free-for-all.

She lined us up and had us sing a song.

Is tunelessness a kind of moral wrong?

She poised her ear beside my churning bouche

tilted her pretty eyebrow, bade me hush.

Sing, sing, you’re out of key!

Your daddy is a chimpanzee,

And you must feel you’re one-of-the-crowd …

but Sweet, don’t speak that need too loud.

The pipers surged from childhood like a wave

their kilts and sporrans swaying like sea-kelp,

drum-major hurling high his gleaming stave,

and petit-moi too drowned in skirl for help.

First music here, the musketry of drums,

bass drummer apronned in his leopard skin,

and pipers with their urgent sonar plumes

creating turmoil that my life was in.

Coming, coming, ready or no.

Your hidey-holes are where you’ll grow.

Here’s Mister Snot behind the door,

some petit moi who’s sixty-four!

                   Alan Gould