robert cowan

Catskills

for the landracers

“Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.”

– William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)

Though skilled, I’m not sure all of us cats were that practical. But the blond boy loved us nonetheless. I first met him when his black-haired mother fished me out of a sewer with a rake and then let his red-haired sister name me. The girl chose one of my own body parts, naming me “Tail,” which somehow seemed fitting to them because I was always afraid. Always high-tailing it out. I was only willing to receive love from the woman, not the children or the bearded man who came later. We calicos are almost all female, like me, as this coloration is linked to the X chromosome. Hair in black, red, blond, calico. We all have our respective colorations.

Before me, there had been Buttons and Omar. Buttons ran away when they moved from Long Island to Westchester and never returned. Omar was, I think, a Siamese, not sure what happened to him. Then came O’Shaughnessy, a big orange tabby. He was nice, but fat and lazy. Liked to sleep in the street. Literally. Against the curb. We kept telling him that that was a bad idea. And of course it was. Stupid flat motherfucker. Tiger, who was piebald black and white, was the boy’s favorite out of the initial group because he was a serious hunter. The blond boy seemed to like cats with an active purpose. Tiger was into leaving trophies for the people. He’d leave the standard cat’s kills—mice, moles—but he also occasionally left some big stuff—a squirrel, a crow. Twice bats got into the house. One time, the bat swooped down going from the living room to the dining room and the people heard a swift crunch and Tiger stood there for a moment, bat head in his mouth like a heavy metal singer, waiting for the flapping to stop. The blond boy was little and thought that was very cool. When Tiger eventually died of leukemia, the blond boy was heartbroken. The blond boy was up in the mountains staying with another family when they got the call from the black-haired woman, his mother, that they’d had to put Tiger down. It’s such a mixed bag not being in charge of one’s own destiny, which is why I was determined to die in my sleep of old age, but it is kind that they administer these lethal doses to us so that we don’t suffer. I appreciate the pragmatism of that. Not sure why they think it’s wrong to do so to themselves. I guess they think they’re not animals.

They call species like ours—the humans and us cats—landraces: domesticated, locally adapted, traditional varieties, formed through adaptation to our natural environment of agriculture and pastoralism, all genetically similar. But we’re not racing over the land as they are. They race, seemingly all the time, against each other. Toward where, toward what? A future that will be here too soon without us rushing to it. 

—

After being divorced from the black-haired woman, the blond boy’s bearded father would come get him to spend the weekend with the other blond boy, the father’s new wife’s son. I would then hear the blond boy at dinner during the week telling his mother about all the cats they had over at the other blond boy’s house. The head honcho seemed to be a huge cat named Charlie. I couldn’t tell from the description whether he was a bicolor or calico, sounded mostly black and white. Then there were Magee and Molly—he mostly gray, she gray tabby. Molly seemed to have a lot of litters, like four or something. The blond boy took home two kittens from one of Molly’s litters, which he named Ace and Tchaikovsky—the new favorites. Dagmar was not going to like that. She was a disgruntled tabby who came along after O’Shaughnessy and Tiger. Came with that name from someone else. Generally considered a bitch. Not sure what her deal was. Always bent out of shape about anyone in her space. I get that. It’s not easy sharing the space that defines us.

Tchaikovsky was very good natured, but not very smart, and thus made ill-considered choices. He disappeared for a few months. Finally one day he showed up looking scrawny and mangy with a collar and a tag with a new name. Came up from between the two garages and through the backyard like it weren’t nothin’. The black-haired woman suspected he had been catnapped by the crazy old lady catty corner behind them. After a few days Tchaik disappeared again. So the black-haired woman went to the old lady. When the batty lady opened the door just a crack, the cat shit smell was overwhelming and the woman could see many cats in the background. But the old lady said she didn’t know anything about the woman’s missing cat. The police said they had a whole file on the batty old lady, but they could only get the woman’s cat back if she wanted to press charges against her. So Tchaikovsky, who wasn’t very smart, who had disappeared into that house again, presumably remained, probably not that unhappy, called something different. Funny how humans think they can just keep changing our names. Seems overly complicated. So, the family focused on the other cat, Ace, who had the place to herself by then. Living in a house with a ton of cats doesn’t sound fun to me. Do you think the Moon looks down at the Earth and wishes that it were part of the action? Wishes it was part of all of that activity going on, all over the place on Earth? Or do you think that it really enjoys its solitude and is grateful to be far removed from all the chaos of that place, like Ace felt when she was drowsy on the radiator next to the stack of National Geographics? Regardless, Tchaikovsky lived in his hectic commune and Ace alone with her humans, neither name seeming to have any bearing on who they actually were.

The other blond boy’s mother named a new kitten Hallelujah, so that they could call her Lulu for short, and so, when they called for her outside, they could call out, “Haaaa-llelujah!” I think the cat died shortly thereafter, as they lived on a road where people drove too fast. Not sure if she is risen. Another of Molly’s kittens, Butchy, disappeared for like two years and then just showed up one day but he didn’t stay long. Some cats gotta roam. There was also a cat named Skipper at the other blond boy’s house, a Maine coon, but I didn’t know him and it’s hard to comment on the unknown.

—

The suburb, the exurb, the outer borough, the country—those were all the places the blond boy had eventually cats, until he wasn’t a blond boy anymore. He got married and became a light brown-haired man, monochromatic, not sure if his pheomelanin level just dropped over time or if a gene got turned on or off. Sometimes our colors change.

Norma was the penultimate cat. She came with the brown-haired man’s chestnut-haired wife. A Maine coon as well. Died around the same time as a country singer they loved. Shortly before their blonde daughter was born. There was some kind of reincarnation thing going on there with the three of them. Norma was the wife’s furry beloved, the baby daughter their almost hairless one. Finally, there was Sigrid. Sigi was the cat they got for the little blonde daughter when they lived on those several acres in Vermont, but she was an outdoor cat. So, when they moved back to the city, they left her with another family who lived inside a forest. The daughter was only two, so I don’t know how much she actually missed the cat. Regret doesn’t exist until we can remember our dreams.

Now the brown-haired man and his chestnut wife have no more cats. They have rabbits—one white with gray trim, the other honey-colored—who they let eat their books. Mostly review copies of ones that they’re not interested in, their own books caged up, some after having been ravaged, as if those volumes are the subversive ones. When in fact I know it is the rabbits themselves subverting dominant paradigms, unbeknownst to humans, but noted by us cats.

—

 Tchaikovsky liked to sit on top of the television and watch it upside down, his nose touching the screen, cooking himself into alternate reality. The brown-haired man’s blonde daughter liked shows where people made clothes. Reality shows in which the most powerful people don’t make very interesting things. The most cut-throat people are cupcakes with garlic centers, reality shows. Their creations make it to the end precisely because they are just close enough to the last next thing to be the next next thing. That’s how they go in for the kill. Reality shows that people who make interesting things are only kept in the game to keep the basic tension, between the judges thinking they’re nothing and thinking they’re everything. But reality also shows that understanding of our limits is not universal, for reality (outside of reality shows) shows itself to be highly variable. But us cats don’t understand why humans make things in the first place. Human ambition seems stupid. 

I can see the brown-haired man writing in the morning. He talks to me about random memories. Watching CNN anchor Bernard Shaw mumbling through his moustache about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Posing for college art classes with his glasses off, as they had asked, unfocused and trying not to fall down. The woman on the street yesterday yell-spelling a word to someone over the phone—“I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-E-D.” The memories of his black-haired mother, the woman who fished me out of the sewer with a rake, now gone. The brown-haired man has lost a bunch of humans, who won’t know what he’s achieved. And we both have lost a lot of cats. I try to explain to him that he’s not alone, and achievements don’t actually mean much. I never let anyone but his mother pet me, because she understood being there but not being too present. Being part of the action but not wanting to be. I had the freedom to choose when to engage. I could high-tail it out when I didn’t feel like it and curl up in her lap when I felt the trust. This sensitivity is crucial to maintaining balance. Like landing on your feet. One of our many cat skills.

—

 When I died, there was a knock at the door. It was early, about 7:30, a warm summer day, and the blond boy, still in high school, had his painter’s whites on, about to go to work. The blond boy opened the door to find the skinny old kind neighbor, with a glum look on his face and his hands behind his back. Without saying a word, he produced me by the tail. I’d curled up on the front lawn and ceased to be, but I was stiff and he held me up like a fur popsicle, four white feet sticking out at the blond boy, who almost burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. Ironic that my “handle,” Tail, had become a literal handle. Practical.

I don’t know if it was when I was dying, before the skinny old kind neighbor found me, or whether this was a dream I used to have. But I sensed two worlds on the insides of my eyelids. One was jagged, composed of glass shards covered in tar. I was terrified, then horrified—my heart raced, then stopped short. The other world was more bound up with the sensations of my body. There I felt inflated and made of dough, with no fur at all, bare, and I was on a bright flat dough plain with small surface holes. And I couldn’t tell whether my claws were making the holes as I walked and they were closing up behind me or not. It was so bright in that world that I could only see faint outlines—no color, no focus. I began to feel within the dough that my bones were actually made of thin lengths of steel or maybe something lighter like carbon. What was both pleasurable and frustrating about this world was that while dough and steel felt good, one emerging from the other, no fully dough or steel incarnation felt quite right. The transition was more comforting than the static state. The dough would dry into granules, each an autonomous dot but fit into a larger patterned system. This feeling of being both a tiny part and a giant whole emanated from the paws and worked its way up the body. It was almost as if I could feel it moving up and over the various parts of my brain, stopping halfway up the back of the skull between the naked ears. Never beyond the back of the materialistic cerebrum, to the part that actually solved problems, as if that were separate, an anomalous evolutionary kink of cats. But this sensation would then be obscured by white light and I would be lying on my side on the front lawn between the two patches of pachysandra, among a few basswood leaves. I liked to nap there, in pure peace, knowing I was loved by this blond boy with his weird ambition and his mother with the black hair, even if I mostly wanted everyone to leave me alone. 

Robert Cowan has published two poetry collections, with Paloma Press—Elsewhen and Close Apart—and three essay collections—Solace in Oblivion, Teaching Double Negatives, and The Indo-German Identification. He is a literature professor at the City University of New York and more information about him and his work can be found at https://robertcowan.space/.