My Red Cat

Ron De Maris

is lying on top of the refrigerator
sleeping. She is the sun and the moon
of her tiny world, her galactic
habitat. Kitchen shelves, the piano, under
shoes in a dark closet or
scampering in a frenzy chasing who-knows-what.

My cat copies the dog. Their chins
propped up on the stoop waiting
for the glass doors to open. She sleeps,
her cat tail twining the dog’s tail,
or when the dog rolls on its back,
the cat rolls too, paws up, waiting for her scratch.

Tonight she has brought an offering, a mouse
freshly killed. Cat symmetry includes
the blood of others, her beauty
evolved to stun her prey like a tourist
standing before the Pietà.
Does this housecat, so soft and cuddly,

remember she was worshipped as the guardian
of granaries? She is as wide as
the silos of Kansas, her shadow as tall
as the storage towers. Her whiskers
protrude like telephone lines.
In Egypt she was a god like the sun,

her jeweled body buried with kings,
owning her own mousery
to hunt and devour in heaven. She kept
famine away in the Nile Valley, she saved
civilizations and then outlasted them.
Now she is reduced to a pet

meowing for milk. Don’t be fooled.

Ron De Maris has poems in the American Poetry Review, the Antioch Review, Atlanta Review, the Iowa Review, the Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. His new book manuscript, The Lost Jockey, will be seeking a publisher this fall.

“My Red Cat” appears in our Summer 2009 issue.