Ti-min Lavoie

This is my cat, Ti-min.

• Climbing into boxes. (The box in the picture is the box my riding helmet came in.)
• Sleeping in the middle of the stairs
• Catching birds and making their little bones go crunch-crunch
• The sound of the can-opener opening tuna
• Sitting on homework and hearing the paper rustle
• Jumping into plastic bags and being carried around
• Lying on black things and covering them with white hair
• His favorite food in the world is cooked deli turkey
• Having his face scratched
• Waiting outside for me to come home at night and meeting me on the way
• Sitting at the table in a chair of his own

He doesn't like:

• Going to the vet
• Taking pills
• Being moved out of the center of the bed

Ti-min has one blue eye and one green eye. I carried him home as a kitten in a carboard box, walking for miles. I found him in a horrible pet shop, crowded in a tiny cage with a dozen other kittens. When he was little, he likes to sit on the side of the bathtub and keep my company while I had a bath. Once he fell in, but he has never fallen in since then. he has caught all manner of creatures: mice, birds, bats -- one day he caught a little rabbit, but I took it away from him and let it go outside.

Pablo Neruda says of cats:

 
Man wants to be fish or fowl,
the snake would like to have wings
the dog is a disoriented lion,
the engineer would like to be a poet,
the fly studies to be a swift,
the poet tries to imitate the fly,
but the cat 
only wants to be a cat
and any cat is a cat
from his whiskers to his tail,
from his hopeful vision of a rat 
to the real thing,
from the night to his golden eyes.

There is no unity 
like him,
the moon and the flower
do not have such context:
he is just one thing
like the sun or the topaz,
and the elastic line of his contours
is firm and subtle like
the line of a ship's prow.
His yellow eyes
have just one 
groove
to coin the gold of night time.


Oh little
emperor without a sphere of influence
conqueror without a country,
smallest living-room tiger, nuptial
sultan of the sky,
of the erotic roof-tiles,
the wind of love
in the storm
you claim
when you pass
and place
four delicate feet
on the ground,
smelling,
distrusting
all that is terrestrial,
because everything
is too unclean
for the immaculate foot of the cat.


Oh independent wild beast
of the house
arrogant
vestige of the night,
lazy, gymnastic
and alien,
very deep cat,
secret policeman
of bedrooms,
insignia
of a 
disappeared velvet,
surely there is no
enigma
in your manner,
perhaps you are not a mystery,
everyone knows of you 
and you belong
to the least mysterious inhabitant,
perhaps everyone believes it,
everyone believes himself the owner,
proprietor,
uncle
of a cat,
companion,
colleague,
disciple
or friend
of his cat.


Not me.
I do not subscribe.
I do not know the cat.
I know it all, life and its archipelago,
the sea and the incalculable city,
botany,
the gyneceum and its frenzies,
the plus and the minus of mathematics,
the volcanic frauds of the world,
the unreal shell of the crocodile,
the unknown kindness of the fireman,
the blue atavism of the priest,
but I cannot decipher a cat.
My reason slips on his indifference,
his eyes have golden numbers.