Breath & Shadow
2006 - Vol. 3, Issue 8
Two Poems
written by
Paul Kahn
"Guest in My House"
The cat,
my mannered but ungrateful guest,
reclines upon my counterpane
and idly assesses me
while I undress for bed.
I feel
that I must be in his regard
a woefully deficient cat —
ungraceful as I struggle from
my clothes and wanly bald.
He yawns:
my study leaves him bored. And so,
he stands, unspools himself in air,
then reconvenes upon the floor and with
a haughty tail departs.
In vain
I call him back. He's disinclined
just now to humor my conceit
that by my noisy naming
I can know or claim his soul.
He is
unknowable. At times he dreams,
paws twitching in some phantom chase,
or watches out the window like
a rapt and brooding sphinx,
as though
for some lost love to reappear
or for a black–hulled freighter crewed
by leopards sent to chasten us,
an upstart humankind,
who used
to meekly build white temples to
his avatars, then shooed them out
with brooms in favor of our pride.
Now he spurns me instead.
Yet I
shall worship him again with such
small offerings as tuna fish
and these poor words that fall and fail
to catch his subtle grace,
because
his beauty opens me to awe,
to worlds as far off as the black
stars of his eyes, as near as the
low thrumming of his heart.
"Tigers"
If I fell out of love with life,
I would not think that tigers were magnificent.
I would not long to hug a tiger,
to nest my cheek in his furry nape,
to stroke his massive face,
and chest to chest to feel
the thrilling kinship of his breath.
If I fell out of love with life,
I would not try to paint
the perfect painting of a tiger.
I would not try to imitate his coat
with gold and white impasto,
or mime his stealth with graceful lines,
or glaze on glaze recall the knowing in his eyes.
No more this aching worship and
these tributes to the surfaces of things,
if I fell out of love with life.
Instead a white, cold sleep, a hush of snow
that flake by flake obliterates
the edges of desire.
I dread this pall. And yet,
how long can I remain alive, awake
when tigers do not come to me to pose
or offer their embrace?
"Tigers" was first published in Sahara.
Paul Kahn's prose poem "Landscapes" was published in the April 2004 issue of Breath & Shadow. He is a playwright, poet, editor, and freelance writer with a neuromuscular disability who lives in the Boston area. His plays have been produced in California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Beside Breath & Shadow, his poems have been published in Sahara, Ibbetson Street, and have won prizes from Inglis House and been included in their anthologies Something Close to Beautiful and On the Outskirts.