Sherry Chandler

In the Box

via Jeff Hess

Five cats, a guitar, and an engraving

This Polaroid snap was taken in 1976 in an apartment on Woodland Avenue in Chicago. The cats in the foreground are Cynthia, Gremlin, Griddlebone, and Jenny-any-dots. Over behind the guitar case is the matriarch Teufelsdröckh.

To see the Dürer referenced below, follow this link.

From Santa Lucia

          . . . All women
are masochists. I was so young, believing
every word they said. Dürer is second rate.
Dürer’s Eve feeds her apple to the snake;
snaky tresses, cat at her feet, at Adam’s foot
a mouse. Male fear, male eyes and art.

— Robert Hass, Praise (The Ecco Press, 1979)

Cool cats

Mythical cats and cats in their cups

Photo by TR Williams

. . . he lay awake for a while with the cat lying on his duvet, purring like a mobile generator. He always thought a feline in the bedroom was appropriate, in a way. A cat was the Celtic equivalent to the dog Cerberus—the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. Randy could watch over him as he slipped across the vulnerable threshold between waking and sleeping.

—Stephen Booth, Scared to Live (Bantam, 2008)

The domestic nature of the male

Baxter and Possum are looking gaunt and fragile this year, which grieves me. They are sixteen this year. They were magnificent playful creatures in their day.

The white specks on the driveway are locust blossoms.

On to the quote

He forked some duck-and-turkey Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, who rubbed himself briefly against Cooper’s legs. Though they had met each other only a few months before, the cat was very much a part of the scenery in Cooper’s new life—which went to prove that you didn’t need to work at a relationship for years and years, didn’t it?

“Where’s your friend, Randy?”

He called the other cat Mrs. Macavity, because she came and went so mysteriously. In fact, Cooper wasn’t sure where she really lived. Apart from a couple of months she spent in his conservatory, caring for the five rather scruffy black-and-white kittens she’d produced in her basket one morning, her presence was unpredictable. He thought she might have an entire list of homes she called on when she felt like it. A meal here today, next door tomorrow.

Once a new home had been found for all the kittens among her family, Mrs. Macavity had returned to her old ways. She was much more a free spirit than Randy, who didn’t wander far from his warm basket next to the boiler in the conservatory. He used the cat flap to do whatever he needed to do in the garden, weighed up the weather, and either lay for a while in the sun or came straight back to his basket. He was an animal with a fixed routine and firm ideas of what was his territory and what wasn’t. Cooper liked that. He thought there was something in that attitude that enabled a person to establish a home. [pp 173-174]

—Stephen Booth, Blind to the Bones (Random House, 2003)

Drunk with spring

One plant that thrives on our place with no attention whatsoever — in fact, with some discouragement — is catmint/nip. Which makes this patch beside the garden a favorite place for our old black cat, Baxter, to take the sun and a nip.

In this particular shot, you’ll see a plant we had broken off. (There’s also a sprig of creeping charlie; we’re a haven for mints of all kinds.) When I first noticed Baxter over there, he was vigorously rubbing his face on the broken stems, but by the time I retrieved the camera, he was just mellow.

Jim Lally

A Hanging

1)

My life, tied up
in the middle of house chores,
loses itself in hanging clothes
on the line between
the tulip poplar and red maple.
This is a job I make meticulous
with unnecessary arranging
and sorting by color and shape.
Suddenly, I sense someone
behind me.
“That’s alright,” she says,
“don’t stop hanging.”
I hear her camera clicking.
“I’m doing a photo essay
on bed linens and dish rags.
It’s one of the best-selling subjects
at my gallery.”
An artist, it seems, from Pasadena
has accidentally
made her way to my dead-end
road to ask for directions
to the covered bridge.

I keep on hanging
every item from my basket;
by then she’s discovered
the chickens – framing
the hens in the falling down
barn yard while trying to avoid
the roosters.

“I grew up on a farm,” she says,
“but where I live now,
there are laws against clothes lines
and domesticated fowl.”
“Wow!” is all I can say.
“You’re in the middle of nowhere,”
she says. “How did you find this place?”
“Every nowhere is somewhere,” I say
and notice her foot prints in places
she’ll later regret.
“I’ll send you some prints,”
she says, getting into her car.

2)

Four a.m.
summer solstice
the cat wants out
the rooster crows
and I suddenly remember
the clothes
hanging on the line
………….. a ghostly image
of flapping sheets
on someone’s upscale
California wall.

— Jim Lally, from his chapbook Stick Tight Man (Accents, 2010), used by permission of the author

Here is Jim Lally’s bio from the Accents Publishing web page:

Jim Lally is a Lexington poet known for his curly white beard and straggly ponytail. He is a member of the Poets’ Supper, Poezia, and Holler writers’ groups, as well as the founding member of Writers at Artcroft. He graduated with a degree in English from Brescia College, where he was the editor of the school’s first literary magazine. Jim has been the Spoken Word Artist at the Walk for the Arts in Berea for the last two years. He is a partner with his wife, Jennifer Gleason, in the organic farm business of Sunflower Sundries. His poetry ranges from the irregularly scattered to the tangle of the stranglehold.

His chapbook, Stick Tight Man, was, I believe Accents Publishing’s first publication.