Marge Piercy (1936-)
The cat's song
1Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
2My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
3the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
4milk from his mother's forgotten breasts.
5Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
6I'll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
7to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
8Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.
9You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
10says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
11Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
12Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?
13Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
14My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
15My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
16walking round and round your bed and into your face.
17Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
18as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
19I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
20Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
21of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
22and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
Copyright 1992 Mars & Her Children by Marge Piercy Alfred A. Knopf
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
This poem cannot be published anywhere without the written consent of Marge Piercy, Leapfrog Press or Knopf permissions department.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: © Marge Piercy. Mars & Her Children by Marge Piercy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992): 147. PS 3566 I4M37 1992 Robarts Library
First publication date:
1992
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 2000.
Recent editing: 2:2002/4/11
Form note: unrhyming quatrains, closed by a couplet (an extended sonnet)
Other poems by Marge Piercy
