catapult magazine

Teachings of a [Feline] Saint

by Benjamin Groenewold Van Dyk

There is in stillness an answer,
a spiritual mentor once taught me:
she was curled up then nearly
into the perfect circle,
rapt in a trance of ? peace, I think. I couldn?t tell
if she was there at all, or if she had leapt some chasm into
distant times and now walked (with curving tail)
through twilight lands and arcane lore.
Was she seeing again the Transfiguration,
the creation of Light itself, or the First Cat?
Perhaps she was merely sitting on a windowsill
in the house of Being, looking Out
into the timeless: that state is undistinguishable
(for the observer) from sleep.

There is an answer also in her ricochet
yesterday off the wall into wild catapulting action.
I heard the furry ambulance yelling glossolalia
too late to vacate the road so
she barreled between my legs then
? following my collapse ?
missed barely my face on the daring leap
across meandthecouch.
One learns in walking a certain vigilance
(near relative, perhaps to tension?)
when the Answer is a repeated thunderbolt
with trembling whiskers and big eyes.

While she sleeps
I tiptoe about my thoughts and the kitchen,
quiet enough sometimes to attend
to her stillness which, like a river, flows.
When have I ever draped my back feet
gracefully across my nose?
When she wakes, her slow-opening-eyes
first will Focus, then Blink at me,
as if to Ask:
and what is your relationship to the miraculous?
Can you take a bath without getting wet?
Or twistdoublebackwards catch
from air a filament of the profound or
stretch like this?
And above all, in the sun or near someone you love,
do you purr?