Two Poems

Rebecca Warren

The Tuxedo Cat

Two years into the disaster
my mother was still feeding a cold.
It was summer and we were at Nags Head
when my father painted for me
a tuxedo cat
with a black bow tie
at the top of his shirt front bib,
red and purple,
a cat with green eyelids
and lemony teeth,
a cat who stayed on my dresser
for all the years after
and looked at the room he was part of
as if there were something here
never given, never taught exactly or learned,
a hard habit in his looking,
green and purple.  And outside, beyond us
there were trees and other houses,
plowed fields where my father painted
the cedars and junipers
as real as he could make them,
black and triangular as spades.

***

The Old People

The old people whisk past us
in the forest of time.
They take out their teeth
and shout, Louder! Louder!
but it is not my turn to listen.
I am bad enough already, it seems,
at bowling and the naming of things.
I have taken almost all the wrong turns
to the garden,
Grandfather poking my back with his knees,
his long finger pointing out houses
he knew as a boy,
knew better than I can imagine,
my mind full of boxes and dust.
Meanwhile the dogwoods
burst open their hands in white crosses,
the tulip trees start to unfurl,
and I am alone in the tree I am climbing,
the hillside a green distance beyond,
hawk and crow adept in their circling fight.
Cows walk the slow pathways,
their new calves resting, blue-white in pale sun,
wind shining their voices
where the trees bend every sound into light.

Rebecca Warren’s poem, "Chalk," won the Guy Owen Prize for 2000.  In 2009, her poem “In the Neighborhood of Fire”  was co-winner of NCSU’s Brenda L. Smart Prize for Poetry, and her poem “Doorway” was awarded The Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize.She is the 2010 winner of NCWN's Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize.

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