HOME | DD

Description
Acrylic on acrylic paper

The dancing tree doesn't quite go with this poem but it does represent the release I feel from writing it.

Can a Cat look at a Queen?

Nothing can fill this void

Even the faintest trace left by her passing
Still marks painfully my stammering heart.
No wounds cut deep in knifelike traces
Can count the countless thrusts and slices
Enumerating backward
The series of events
That would justify this little death,
This death of something love-like,
This ending of all heart and hope,
For which darkness is too light a word.

For all I feel each time
I hear, say, or write her name,
Each time I hear her thoughts in black and white,
Each time she laughs, smiles, and cries,
Each commentary that reveals her sensual intelligence,
And I imagine her my friend again,
My dear, my dear lost friend...

For all the heavy, absent grey,
Which masks all happy thought
Which masks all that is not nothing for me,
All that which could be something, something else and more,
And would perhaps end my pain in a real but happy death…

And even before my eyes, a branch, a tree,
My stretching fingers can almost touch
Almost pawing, almost knowing,
Almost in the presence of
Whom, what or how she might have been,
This cat looks at his Queen.

And although other sensual fruit hang hopefully
I have no will to pick, pluck or eat
She will never speak to me again,
The rise, fall and gift of her voice,
Will always be for someone else,
Anyone else can be her friend, but me,
This cat looks at his Queen.

I once held her in my hand
She was once my prey, my prisoner
A human being mouse-sized by her own will
A meal caged in my claws
Traversing nightmarish passes
Into my path and into my thrall
But now this cat curls to sleep
Tired, he looks away…
This cat can no longer look at his Queen.

© Chesya October 2007

Description
Acrylic on acrylic paper

The dancing tree doesn't quite go with this poem but it does represent the release I feel from writing it.

Can a Cat look at a Queen?

Nothing can fill this void

Even the faintest trace left by her passing
Still marks painfully my stammering heart.
No wounds cut deep in knifelike traces
Can count the countless thrusts and slices
Enumerating backward
The series of events
That would justify this little death,
This death of something love-like,
This ending of all heart and hope,
For which darkness is too light a word.

For all I feel each time
I hear, say, or write her name,
Each time I hear her thoughts in black and white,
Each time she laughs, smiles, and cries,
Each commentary that reveals her sensual intelligence,
And I imagine her my friend again,
My dear, my dear lost friend...

For all the heavy, absent grey,
Which masks all happy thought
Which masks all that is not nothing for me,
All that which could be something, something else and more,
And would perhaps end my pain in a real but happy death…

And even before my eyes, a branch, a tree,
My stretching fingers can almost touch
Almost pawing, almost knowing,
Almost in the presence of
Whom, what or how she might have been,
This cat looks at his Queen.

And although other sensual fruit hang hopefully
I have no will to pick, pluck or eat
She will never speak to me again,
The rise, fall and gift of her voice,
Will always be for someone else,
Anyone else can be her friend, but me,
This cat looks at his Queen.

I once held her in my hand
She was once my prey, my prisoner
A human being mouse-sized by her own will
A meal caged in my claws
Traversing nightmarish passes
Into my path and into my thrall
But now this cat curls to sleep
Tired, he looks away…
This cat can no longer look at his Queen.

© Chesya October 2007