Possum, who is stubborn (maybe because she only has about two brain cells) was sleeping in the corner of the cabinet top. This position is defensible, you see, from all the big males in the house, but we humans didn’t find it acceptable so we bribed her with a bed and now, for the moment, she sleeps on the dryer. Slight improvement but she doesn’t look any happier.

Another cat poem from Baudelaire:

Le Chat

I

Dans ma cervelle se promène,
Ainsi qu’en son appartement,
Un beau chat, fort, doux et charmant.
Quand il miaule, on l’entend à peine,

Tant son timbre est tendre et discret;
Mais que sa voix s’apaise ou gronde,
Elle est toujours riche et profonde.
C’est là son charme et son secret.

Cette voix, qui perle et qui filtre
Dans mon fonds le plus ténébreux,
Me remplit comme un vers nombreux
Et me réjouit comme un philtre.

Elle endort les plus cruels maux
Et contient toutes les extases;
Pour dire les plus longues phrases,
Elle n’a pas besoin de mots.

Non, il n’est pas d’archet qui morde
Sur mon coeur, parfait instrument,
Et fasse plus royalement
Chanter sa plus vibrante corde,

Que ta voix, chat mystérieux,
Chat séraphique, chat étrange,
En qui tout est, comme en un ange,
Aussi subtil qu’harmonieux!

II

De sa fourrure blonde et brune
Sort un parfum si doux, qu’un soir
J’en fus embaumé, pour l’avoir
Caressée une fois, rien qu’une.

C’est l’esprit familier du lieu;
Il juge, il préside, il inspire
Toutes choses dans son empire;
peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?

Quand mes yeux, vers ce chat que j’aime
Tirés comme par un aimant,
Se retournent docilement
Et que je regarde en moi-même,

Je vois avec étonnement
Le feu de ses prunelles pâles,
Clairs fanaux, vivantes opales
Qui me contemplent fixement.

— Charles Baudelaire

A translation:

The Cat

I

A fine strong gentle cat is prowling
As in his bedroom, in my brain;
So soft his voice, so smooth its strain,
That you can scarcely hear him miowling.

But should he venture to complain
Or scold, the voice is rich and deep:
And thus he manages to keep
The charm of his untroubled reign.

This voice, which seems to pearl and filter
Through my soul’s inmost shady nook,
Fills me with poems, like a book,
And fortifies me, like a philtre.

His voice can cure the direst pain
And it contains the rarest raptures.
The deepest meanings, which it captures,
It needs no language to explain.

There is no bow that can so sweep
That perfect instrument, my heart:
Or make more sumptuous music start
From its most vibrant cord and deep,

Than can the voice of this strange elf,
This cat, bewitching and seraphic,
Subtly harmonious in his traffic
With all things else, and with himself.

II

So sweet a perfume seems to swim
Out of his fur both brown and bright,
I nearly was embalmed one night
From (only once) caressing him.

Familiar Lar of where I stay,
He rules, presides, inspires and teaches
All things to which his empire reaches.
Perhaps he is a god, or fay.

When to a cherished cat my gaze
Is magnet-drawn and then returns
Back to itself, it there discerns,
With strange excitement and amaze,

Deep down in my own self, the rays
Of living opals, torch-like gleams
And pallid fire of eyes, it seems,
That fixedly return my gaze.

— translated by Roy Campbell in Flowers of Evil A Selection, ed Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New Directions, 1955)

The Lar that Campbell refers to here is the singular of Lares, the domestic gods of the ancient Romans. There was a lar familiarie, which was the familiar of the house. Possum, lately, has been entirely too familiar with some places for my comfort. Peanut, on the other hand, has staked out the top of my desk and will not be moved. We tried a bed for him, thinking we could entice him away, but he sleeps beside it.

Hard to get much done around here.

For other translations, see Fleur du Mal

because I outsmarted myself.

Care to try?

How smart are you?

Let me also recommend that you check out my Twitter anthology of favorites.

Ah yes, and Black Bert for a catblog:

The Confession

Once, only once, beloved and gentle lady,
          Upon my arm you leaned your arm of snow.
And on my spirit’s background, dim and shady,
          That memory flashes now.

The hour was late, and like a medal gleaming
          The full moon showed her face,
And the night’s splendour over Paris streaming,
          Filled every silent place.

Along the houses, in the doorways hiding,
          Cats passed with stealthy tread
And listening ear, or followed, slowly gliding,
          Like ghosts of dear ones dead.

Sudden, amid our frank and free relation,
          Born of that limpid light,
From you, rich instrument, whose sole vibration
          Was radiancy and light —

From you, joyous as bugle-call resounding
          Across the woods at morn,
With sharp and faltering accent, strangely sounding,
          Escaped one note forlorn.

Like some misshapen infant, dark, neglected,
          Its kindred blush to own,
And long have hidden, by no eye detected,
          In some dim cave unknown.

Your clashing note cried clear, poor, prisoned spirit,
          That nothing in the world is sure or fast,
And that man’s selfishness, though decked as merit,
          Betrays itself at last.

That hard the lot to be a queen of beauty,
          And all is fruitless, like the treadmill toil
Of some paid dancer, fainting at her duty,
          Still with her vacant smile.

That if one build on hearts, ill shall befall it,
          That all things crack, and love and beauty flee,
Until oblivion flings them in his wallet,
          Spoil of eternity.

Oft have I called to mind that night enchanted,
          The silence and the languor over all,
And that wild confidence, thus harshly chanted,
          At the heart’s confessional.

— Charles Baudelaire, translated by Lois Saunders, from Flowers of Evil, A Selection (New Directions, 1955)

The original:

Confession

Une fois, une seule, aimable et douce femme,
À mon bras votre bras poli
S’appuya (sur le fond ténébreux de mon âme
Ce souvenir n’est point pâli);

II était tard; ainsi qu’une médaille neuve
La pleine lune s’étalait,
Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuve,
Sur Paris dormant ruisselait.

Et le long des maisons, sous les portes cochères,
Des chats passaient furtivement
L’oreille au guet, ou bien, comme des ombres chères,
Nous accompagnaient lentement.

Tout à coup, au milieu de l’intimité libre
Eclose à la pâle clarté
De vous, riche et sonore instrument où ne vibre
Que la radieuse gaieté,

De vous, claire et joyeuse ainsi qu’une fanfare
Dans le matin étincelant
Une note plaintive, une note bizarre
S’échappa, tout en chancelant

Comme une enfant chétive, horrible, sombre, immonde,
Dont sa famille rougirait,
Et qu’elle aurait longtemps, pour la cacher au monde,
Dans un caveau mise au secret.

Pauvre ange, elle chantait, votre note criarde:
«Que rien ici-bas n’est certain,
Et que toujours, avec quelque soin qu’il se farde,
Se trahit l’égoïsme humain;

Que c’est un dur métier que d’être belle femme,
Et que c’est le travail banal
De la danseuse folle et froide qui se pâme
Dans son sourire machinal;

Que bâtir sur les coeurs est une chose sotte;
Que tout craque, amour et beauté,
Jusqu’à ce que l’Oubli les jette dans sa hotte
Pour les rendre à l’Eternité!»

J’ai souvent évoqué cette lune enchantée,
Ce silence et cette langueur,
Et cette confidence horrible chuchotée
Au confessionnal du coeur.

— Charles Baudelaire

La Géante

Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux,
J’eusse aimé vivre auprès d’une jeune géante,
Comme aux pieds d’une reine un chat voluptueux.

J’eusse aimé voir son corps fleurir avec son âme
Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux;
Deviner si son coeur couve une sombre flamme
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux;

Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes;
Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes,
Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains,

Lasse, la font s’étendre à travers la campagne,
Dormir nonchalamment à l’ombre de ses seins,
Comme un hameau paisible au pied d’une montagne.

— Charles Baudelaire

Giantess

When Nature once in lustful hot undress
Conceived gargantuan offspring, then would I
Have loved to live near a young giantess,
Like a voluptuous cat at a queen’s feet.

To see her body flower with her desire
And freely spread out in its dreadful play,
Guess if her heart concealed some heavy fire
Whose humid smokes would swim upon her eye.

To feel at leisure her stupendous shapes,
Crawl on the cliffs of her enormous knees,
And, when in summer the unhealthy suns

Have stretched her out across the plains, fatigued,
Sleep in the shadows of her breasts at ease
Like a small hamlet at a mountain’s base.

— Karl Shapiro, from Flowers of Evil, A Selection, ed. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New Directions, 1955)

Other translations here.

A Letter from the Front

I WAS out early to-day, spying about
From the top of a haystack—such a lovely morning—
And when I mounted again to canter back
I saw across a field in the broad sunlight
A young Gunner Subaltern, stalking along
With a rook-rifle held at the ready, and—would you believe it?—
A domestic cat, soberly marching beside him.  

So I laughed, and felt quite well disposed to the youngster,
And shouted out “the top of the morning” to him,
And wished him “Good sport!”—and then I remembered
My rank, and his, and what I ought to be doing:
And I rode nearer, and added, “I can only suppose
You have not seen the Commander-in-Chief’s order
Forbidding English officers to annoy their Allies
By hunting and shooting.”
        But he stood and saluted
And said earnestly, “I beg your pardon, Sir,
I was only going out to shoot a sparrow
To feed my cat with.”
        So there was the whole picture,
The lovely early morning, the occasional shell
Screeching and scattering past us, the empty landscape,—
Empty, except for the young Gunner saluting,
And the cat, anxiously watching his every movement.  

I may be wrong, and I may have told it badly,
But it struck me as being extremely ludicrous. 

—Henry Newbolt, Clarke, George Herbert, ed. A Treasury of War Poetry,
First Series. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917; New York:
Bartleby.com, 2002. 

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

I find this quiz result amusing in that I’ve long said mercy trumps justice. Justice has a tendency to get all mixed up with revenge.

But perhaps I don’t know myself after all. Surely an internet quiz can’t be wrong??

And I am a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Which, I should mention, has now established The Blog of Rights, where today the lead post is written by Nikki Anthony of Breckinridge County, Kentucky:

My name is Nikki Anthony and I just finished eighth grade at Breckinridge County Middle School in Kentucky. The ACLU is representing me, my younger sister, and five other students in a case against our school district and the U.S. Department of Education because our rights are being violated by my school segregating students by sex. I was raised in a house where rights are very important, and I was told, “if you don’t stand up for your rights then they will be taken away.” People in the United States don’t tolerate segregation by sex in everyday life, and yet they want us to tolerate it in our school system when we are supposed to be learning what being free really is.

Justice dictates that I tell you I found this quiz in the sidebar at Suburban Guerrilla. Susie is a Working Class Warrior.

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d’agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s’enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.

— Charles Baudelaire

__________
And the translation:

The Cat

Come, superb cat, to my amorous heart;
Hold back the talons of your paws,
Let me gaze into your beautiful eyes
Of metal and agate.

When my fingers leisurely caress you,
Your head and your elastic back,
And when my hand tingles with the pleasure
Of feeling your electric body,

In spirit I see my woman. Her gaze
Like your own, amiable beast,
Profound and cold, cuts and cleaves like a dart,

And, from her head down to her feet,
A subtle air, a dangerous perfume
Floats about her dusky body.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

I do have a “selected” Fleurs du Mal that I am reading but I found this particular poem at the online edition here.

Photographs taken by my son in support of my tweet of yesterday, to wit:

Orchard grass shoulder high, heads purple with seed. Bluegrass to the waist, red clover to the knee. The sun is shining, time to make hay.

Update: A correspondent has written to ask if I worry about haymaking harming small critters like box turtles, birds, and rabbits. And the fact is that any kind of mowing is dangerous to small creatures. My husband said he scared up a big turkey just mowing the farm road the way you see here. I’ve mowed up rabbits nests and snakes cutting the grass in our side yard with a push mower.

I think, though, even more dangerous than the mowing is the destruction of habitat. The very thing that makes the Bluegrass Region so picturesque, the lovely clean fencerows (some maintained with herbicides), make the place less friendly to small creatures who need shelter to nest and feed. As these photos illustrate, our place is comfortably shabby and our wildlife seems to be abundant. I was even wrong about the meadowlarks. I’ve seen several this year. I just wasn’t in the right place.

Here’s a bonus picture. I put up a photo of this tree earlier when it was bare and the red-winged blackbird was perched high up in it.

(I chose this shot because, if you look closely, you can see the locust blossoms surrounding Bertie’s head and reflected in the car.)

How a Cat Was Annoyed and a Poet Was Booted

A POET had a cat.
There is nothing odd in that—
  (I might make a little pun about the Mews!)
But what is really more
Remarkable, she wore
  A pair of pointed patent-leather shoes.
      And I doubt me greatly whether
          E'er you heard the like of that:
      Pointed shoes of patent-leather
              On a cat!	 

His time he used to pass
Writing sonnets, on the grass—
  (I might say something good on pen and sward!)
While the cat sat near at hand,
Trying hard to understand
  The poems he occasionally roared.
      (I myself possess a feline,
          But when poetry I roar
      He is sure to make a bee-line
              For the door.)	 

The poet, cent by cent,
All his patrimony spent—
  (I might tell how he went from verse to werse!)
Till the cat was sure she could,
By advising, do him good.
  So addressed him in a manner that was terse:
      "We are bound toward the scuppers,
          And the time has come to act,
      Or we'll both be on our uppers
              For a fact!"	  

On her boot she fixed her eye,
But the boot made no reply—
  (I might say: "Couldn't speak to save its sole!")
And the foolish bard, instead
Of responding, only read
  A verse that wasn't bad upon the whole.
      And it pleased the cat so greatly,
          Though she knew not what it meant,
      That I'll quote approximately
              How it went:—	  

"If I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree"—
  (I might put in: "I think I'd just as leaf!")
"Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough"—
  Well, he'd plagiarized it bodily, in brief!
      But that cat of simple breeding
          Couldn't read the lines between,
      So she took it to a leading
              Magazine.	  

She was jarred and very sore
When they showed her to the door.
  (I might hit off the door that was a jar!)
To the spot she swift returned
Where the poet sighed and yearned,
  And she told him that he'd gone a little far.
      "Your performance with this rhyme has
          Made me absolutely sick,"
      She remarked. "I think the time has
              Come to kick!"	 

I could fill up half the page
With descriptions of her rage—
  (I might say that she went a bit too fur!)
When he smiled and murmured: "Shoo!"
"There is one thing I can do!"
  She answered with a wrathful kind of purr.
      "You may shoo me, and it suit you,
          But I feel my conscience bid
      Me, as tit for tat, to boot you!"
              (Which she did.)	  

The Moral of the plot
(Though I say it, as should not!)
  Is: An editor is difficult to suit.
But again there're other times
When the man who fashions rhymes
  Is a rascal, and a bully one to boot!	 

— Guy Wetmore Carryl, from Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999.

The lake is receding, the rain has stopped, though skies remain gray. And the gray stray stands its ground, much to the chagrin of our Black Bert. Bertie, who spent a winter under the house with Ursula the raccoon before he convinced us he was our cat, isn’t about to welcome another waif. I can’t get a good look at the other guy, but Bert has spent the winter nursing abscessed face wounds. He’s bleeding again this morning. Alas, his forays to protect the homestead aren’t moving the big tabby who likes the easy food at the raccoon feeding station.