alastair reid

so here is next door neighbour's cat, mooching for food though too daft to actually eat it. friends, he and i are, which seems odd given that my friends have recently revealed that they think i don't like cats, something that has never been the case. it reminds me to search out this poem by alastair reid about cats, the one i like better than Scotland

curiosity

may have killed the cat. More likely
the cat was just unlucky,or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws,or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
smell rats, leave home, have hunches,
does not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die -
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all. Only the curious
have if they live a tale
worth telling at all.

Dogs says cats love too much, are irresponsible,
are dangerous, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.

Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat-price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat-minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth; and what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who never know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.