Five Days with Kay Ryan: Day 2- A Cat/A Future
This poem also originally appeared in The New Yorker, and was in her book Elephant Rocks.
A Cat/A Future
A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she’s
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.
—
There’s a lot of compressed rhyme in there, or at least assonance: blinds/eyes/decides/likewise, stare/there/(there) and occlude/rude. Occlude is a slightly odd usage, but come on, it’s poetry, home of slightly odd word usages. This poem, however, didn’t quite do it for me, if you know what I mean. I like the bit about the cat’s second set of eyelids, and I get the comparison to the unknown duality of the future (good/bad, or polite/rude) but I think that it needed a little more. Not a lot, but something. As it is, unlike “Blandeur,” if I read it in the New Yorker without hearing about her before, this poem wouldn’t make me run out and buy her book.