"For Katy" by Rodney Jones

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( July 3, 2019 [For Katy]( [Rodney Jones]( When Milo was a kitten and spent the night with us in the big bed, curled like a brown sock at our feet, he would wake before daybreak, squeak plaintively in his best Burmese, cat-castrato soprano, and make bread on our stomachs until if one of us did not rise, sleep-walk to the kitchen and open his can of food, he would steal under the covers, crouch, run hard at us, jam his head in our armpits, and burrow fiercely. Probably he meant nothing by that. Or he meant it in cat-contrary, just as he did not intend drawing blood the day he bolted out the door and was wild again for nearly three hours. I could not catch him until I knelt, wormed into the crawl-space under a neighbor house and lured him home with bits of dried fish. Or he meant exactly what he smelled, and smelled the future as it transmogrified out of the past, for he is, if not an olfactory clairvoyant, a highly nuanced cat— an undoer of complicated knots, who tricks cabinets, who lives to upend tall glasses of Merlot. With his whole body, he has censored the finest passages of Moby-Dick. He has silenced Beethoven with one paw. He has leapt three and a half feet from the table by the wall and pulled down your favorite print by Miró. He does not know the word no. When you asked the vet what kind of cat it was, she went into the next room came back and said, “Havana Brown.” The yellow eyes, the voice, the live spirit that plays into dead seriousness and will not be punished into goodness, but no— an ancient, nameless breed— mink he says and I answer in cat. Even if I was not born in a dumpster between a moldy cabbage and an expired loaf of bread, I too was rescued by an extravagant woman. [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2019 Rodney Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. [Jones reads "For Katy."]( About This Poem “‘For Katy’ began with a journal note about our new kitten’s habit of waking us by charging into our armpits and burrowing. A year later, after [Mary Oliver]( died, I was reading her animal poems and the image came to me again. I stopped and wrote ‘For Katy,’ nearly as it is, in one setting. It is partly a love poem, partly an homage to Mary Oliver, and partly a brag on one cat, Milo Delassize, who entertains us and teaches us tolerance. Once I wanted to write animal poems that proved the bite in naturalism. At this historical juncture, I think more of tenderness. Thus, this play with claws retracted.” —Rodney Jones [Rodney Jones]( Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Village Prodigies (Mariner Books, 2017) and Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006). He teaches in the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. [more-at-poets]( [Imaginary Logic]( Poetry by Jones [Imaginary Logic]( (Mariner Books, 2018) "To Zeke" by Ellen Bass [read-more]( "Little George" by Mark Doty [read-more]( "Soave Sia Il Vento" by Adrian Matejka [read-more]( July Guest Editor: Paul Guest Thanks to [Paul Guest](, author of Because Everything Is Terrible (Diode Editions, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a [Q&A with Guest]( about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our [guest editors for the year.]( [make a one-time donation]( [illustration]( [Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo]( Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit [Poets.org](. You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click [here](. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038 From Our Sponsors [Advertisement](