Archive
Via Negativa
Hyeres
You can’t write a poem about cats,
some professor said some time ago,
so this is not about them and how
they might run this old city that slopes
down to the Cote d’Azur and draws
in the sea. And, why should anyone bother
to describe the water either, blue beyond
blue, what Plato would have called the color’s
essence. So, this is not about how
each yard in the Cite Medieval has
at least two chats—landed gentry—
black, white or gray typically
but also the occasional yellow
or brown, though these latter figure more
in alleys, les chats ordinaires,
sleeping with legs or tails draped over walls
built during the time of Francis the First,
Charles of Anjou, or Julius Caesar.
You can’t write about them, even though
they’ve been here since the Phoenicians,
maybe, and if that’s the case they might
have been chasing rats onto triremes
from Egypt itself, mother of all
their unmentionable kind, perhaps.
Nor should you describe how they stroll
on the Avenue du General De Gaulle
past Jeff de Brugges and other fine stores,
tails erect, on the lookout for good deals
like everyone else. In windows, on stoops,
you can’t mention their toilettes or their naps,
or the occasional rendez-vous, either
courteous or, it must be said, sometimes rude.
All this having not been said, as they
are beneath some people’s notice, one might not
want to add that we, being human,
are beneath theirs, as well, and thus stare
with the same perplexity some of us share.
J. Stephen Rhodes is a Presbyterian minister and theological educator. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Windhover, and Tar River Poetry, among others. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (Wind Publications). Among the mammals he has recently seen at or about his feeders (supposedly for birds) are squirrels, chipmunks, a rabbit, a shrew, deer, and two quite rotund raccoons.
Coot in Kentucky
Standing alone in our gravel driveway, you look lost
in your tuxedo, water-bird flown to the wrong address
for an upscale cocktail party; either that or you’ve shown up
two hours late, so you start walking back and forth
as if most of the guests are behind the clapboard house,
as if a group of drakes smoking cigars will be standing
in a circle on the other side of the dented red truck.
In tasteful gray and black, you look out of place,
too sleek for the number eight gravel mixed with sand
on which you stumble in your over-sized, three-toed shoes.
Or, is the party on the Gulf of Mexico, and you’re not late,
just taking a break en route from your summer place up north?
Whatever, you grace our inland home—sparrows, robins,
chickadees, titmice, and us—with a sea-going elegance
we envy as the final oak leaves blow down, and we’re left
with what seems, at least in your presence, our annual upland
ordinariness. When, at last, you run across the parking lot
as you would a pond, flailing your wings, we want to come.
J. Stephen Rhodes is a Presbyterian minister and theological educator. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Windhover, and Tar River Poetry, among others. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (Wind Publications). Among the mammals he has recently seen at or about his feeders (supposedly for birds) are squirrels, chipmunks, a rabbit, a shrew, deer, and two quite rotund raccoons.
qarrtsiluni 