Water
More to affirm again an ancient contract
Than out of thirst, with your percussive tongue
You lap a trickle of water in the bathroom sink
I rinse for you when I’m done shaving. That’s life:
I have had more of it than your allotment.
Man has invented death, says Yeats. “Nor dread
Nor hope attend a dying animal,” I chant—
Not to mock you or him, but the more to honor
Your kind and mine and all our predecessors,
Many of both dead I have known. Have humans
Invented righteousness too, while we were at it?—
I’m not embarrassed to ask a cat. The dreadful
Wars of theocracy shame every invention,
Right down to these harmless pipes that I control.
Chair
I say to you, “Our meeting together in this
Big chair is more than a habit. It’s a custom.”
In your cat way you understand my vocal
Meaning as theatrical noise. And so it is:
Me acting out my nature as a talker
As you with your elegant predator’s oblique
Path to the chair with forays left and right
Act out your nature as an athletic hunter.
I wonder, do you scorn my straight-line route
Here to the chair as artless, the desperate hurry
Of quarry? No. I don’t think you imagine
You’re simply hunting any more than I
Imagine we’re simply having a chat, as we
Enact in mime a sociable time together.
Paper
I tell you, “Move over so I can read the paper.”
Reading my voice and muscles, you make some room
To share my lap with the screen of dread I call
The paper. “Worse all over the world,” I tell you.
It even looks like paper, cleverly aping
The Times or Globe with fonts of horror I scan.
“The morning fish-wrap” Herb Caen called his column.
The pulp-mills weren’t always so good for fish,
But the screen you move aside for is toxic too,
And mammals like us do like the feel of paper.
They say we primates evolved this code of grunts
For hunting in packs. And we scratched out alphabets
For keeping accounts of trade in slaves or olives,
Profits and losses of the lost, solitary hunter.
Robert Pinsky’s new book of poems is Proverbs of Limbo.
