the tabloid of scents

THE CAT'S SONG

Mine, says the cat,
putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend,
my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest
his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s
forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies to- get- her and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.

My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance
as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be
still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy, “The cat’s song” from Mars & Her Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). First appeared in Matrix 28 (Spring 1989). Copyright © 1989, 1992 by Marge Piercy and Middlemarsh, Inc.