Calgary-based Canadian poet Tonya Lailey
The Cat Comes to Me
—after Heather McHugh
The future looks like death to me from here
standing behind you, in the musty basement
where the cat is cornered.
You think on your feet, quickly
engineer a noose from a sponge mop and silicone rope –
medieval design, cheap modern materials.
The cat protests wildly, we call it crazy and laugh,
but it knows its boundaries. Instinctively,
it knows this is cruel.
I ask you to wait, to let the cat be calm,
to approach it later, gently, with kindness.
I do it later myself, alone in the house.
The cat comes to me easily,
I hold it for a bit,
then give it out to the neighbourhood night,
quietly out,
like I had been wanting to do
and would much later, finally.
Tonya Lailey, 2015
I came, truly, to poetry on my knees in my forties, having forgotten a lot about myself, having lost the belief that I could love what I loved, could live that way. I was in a week-long program at a drug and alcohol recovery center: the Discovery Program at Cedars at Cobble Hill in B.C. I went there to begin to learn to recover from my addiction to the addict in my life – my former husband, the father of my two daughters.
Here I met others in similar states of codependence, bearing broken relationships with themselves and others. I also met a man with wild, curly white-grey hair, dramatic arms and a regular HA! that leapt from him with the punch of a Pop Rock’s explosion. His whole being seemed to bounce – with joy and love for what he was doing. What he was doing was sharing poetry and providing the encouragement and safe space for us to write our own poems, an exercise that might encourage our healing. This man, HA!, was Richard Osler.
The epigraph poem above is the main one I wrote in that session with Richard during the week of November 29, 2015. The poem still makes me cry, which tells me how much work it did and is still doing for me. It was the first poem I had written in probably ten years and one of the few I had written at all.
Richard’s prompt was a line – the last one – from Heather McHugh’s fabulous poem: From 20,000 Feet. That line: The future looked like death to it, from there. I adapted that line at the time for my purposes. Here is Heather’s poem:
From 20,000 Feet
The cloud formation looks
Like banks of rock from here,
though rock and cloud are thought
so opposite. Earth’s underlying nature
might be likeness – likeness
everywhere disguised
by wave-length, amplitude and frequency.
(If we got far enough away, could we
decipher the design?) From here
so much goes by
too fast or slow for sight.
(Is death a stretch of time in which
a life is just a flash?) Whatever
we may think, we only
think that we will lose. The foetus,
expert at attachment, didn’t dream that
cramped canal would open
into sound and light and love –
it clung. It didn’t care. The future
looked like death to it, from there.
Heather McHugh (1948 -) from Hinge & Sign, Wesleyan University Press, 1994. (McHugh, a much celebrated American poet, nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and a National book Award has written thirteen books of poetry, essays and translations. She also won a Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002 for her co-translation of the poems of Paul Celan and in 2009 was awarded a prestigious US $500,000 MacArthur fellowship or so-called genius grant.)
