Since this is the internet, it's frankly amazing that our Poetry Friday posts haven't yet succumbed to cute cat pictures. Today, we rectify that, with M. Travis Lane's poem "The Long Way Through the Chairs" (from her collection Temporary Shelter).
Reached through social media, Lane had this to say about what brought about this poem:
I have always lived with cats—and they think about how they move so as to get the most pleasure out of it.
Simple and direct, just like the poem. And like a lot of cats, come to think of it.
The Long Way Through the Chairs
The cat takes the long way through the chairs,
a shadowless embroidery of motion, past
the line between
two points, inobvious, subtle, intricate.
The purely sensual pleasure of the path
is a type of some rare poetry
which makes the way it got there more delight
than ever where it was or is.
It also is a type of life
whose virtue is not one still place
tucked in the warmth of your elbow, nights,
nor this which lies like ink upon the page, which lies,
but truth
which endlessly dissolves,
inobvious, subtle, intricate, motion
its pure delight.
