[Vision2020] Lights, Starry Skies, and Poetry

[Tom Hansen]

Rod McKuen's poetry will live on forever.

 

My personal favorite:

 

-----------------------------------------------

 

"A Cat Named Sloopy"

 

For a while

the only earth that Sloopy knew

                       was in her sandbox.

Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street

          were her domain.

Every night she'd sit in the window

among the avocado plants

waiting for me to come home

   (my arms full of canned liver and love).

We'd talk into the night then

                      contented

but missing something,

She the earth she never knew

me the hills I ran

                while growing bent.

 

Sloopy should have been a cowboy's cat

with prairies to run

                   not linoleum

and real-live catnip mice.

No one to depend on but herself.

 

I never told her

    but in my mind

I was a midnight cowboy even then.

Riding my imaginary horse

down Forty-second Street,

going off with strangers

to live an hour-long cowboy's life,

             but always coming home to Sloopy,

   who loved me best.

 

A dozen summers

we lived against the world.

An island on an island.

She'd comfort me with purring

I'd fatten her with smiles.

We grew rich on trust

      needing not the beach or butterflies

I had a friend named Ben

Who painted buildings like Roualt men.

                                  He went away.

My laughter tired Lillian

after a time

   she found a man who only smiled.

Only Sloopy stay and stayed.

 

Winter.

Nineteen fifty-nine.

Old men walk their dogs.

Some are walked so often

that their feel leave

   little pink tracks

in the soft gray snow.

 

Women fur on fur

             elegant and easy

only slightly pure

hailing cabs to take them

     round the block and back.

Who is not a love seeker

when December comes?

even children pray to Santa Claus.

I had my own love safe at home

and yet I stayed out all one night

                  the next day too.

 

They must have thought me crazy

         screaming

               Sloopy

        Sloopy

as the snow came falling

down around me.

 

I was a madman

to have stayed away

     one minute more

than the appointed hour.

I'd like to think a golden cowboy

snatched her from the window sill,

       and safely saddlebagged

   she rode to Arizona.

She's stalking lizards

in the cactus now perhaps

              bitter but free.

 

I'm bitter too

and not a free man any more.

 

           Once was a time,

in New York's jungle in a tree,

before I went into the world

in search of other kinds of love

nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.

 

----------------------------------------------------------------

 

Take care,

 

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

 

We could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are
dull, some have weird names, and all are different colors....but they all
exist very nicely in the same box. 

 

  _____  

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
On Behalf Of Melynda Huskey
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 10:57 PM
To: Vision 2020
Subject: [Vision2020] Lights, Starry Skies, and Poetry

 

All this talk of the night skies leads me inevitably to poetry (once an
English professor, always an English professor):

 

 The Starlight Night

     Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Look up at the stars! look, look up at the skies! 

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! 

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes! 

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! 

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! 

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! -- 

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. 

 

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows. 

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! 

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! 

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house 

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse 

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows. 

 

Best,

 

Melynda Huskey


  _____  

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