Cat Whisperer

I could serve dinner on his back
he is so bent over. Once
I offered him a ride
from Food Lion where he bought a sliver tower of gourmet cat food.
He limped along Route One
two plastic bags
his ballast in the cruel March wind.

-Liz Dolan

(Wish I could find more about her.)

Wow, it's amazing how quickly April's rolled around. After a couple weeks of lovely, almost unseasonably warm weather, too, we ended up getting fooled with a snowstorm that blew in from the northeast.

I'd not been round for this year's apparently long, hard New England Winter, so found the storm refreshing. None of my friends or neighbors were happy to have to lace up their boots, to slip on their overcoats, to revert to the Winter Mind:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-Wallace Stevens

(Happy Eighth Poetry Month here! Hopefully happy continuation of Spring, as well.)