"final as a plum tree"

The family cats are behaving strangely today. Earlier, I heard a mysterious mewling coming from the hallway, but I couldn't find the source. Later, washing my face in the bathroom, I heard it again and opened a cabinet door to find Diego, our staid old man cat, sitting on a ledge shelf, staring at me with his haughty, green, fishy eyes. He didn't want to be let out, just for me to be aware of his impressive existence there beneath the sink. I shut the door and kept on rinsing.

A much younger Diego trying to get himself mailed to the wild Amazonian jungles.

I've tried to write poems about cats before, but like oranges, I can't seem to grapple with them. They're too strange, too lovely to write about. However, the following poem by Charles Bukowski is a very successful cat poem. (You can hear Garrison Keillor read it on The Writer's Almanac archives.) To me, it captures cat-ness beautifully.

It's also a great poem to teach to beginning writers: it's a spare little piece that's easy to "get," but its similes and metaphors are fantastic, transformational. Bukowski turns the cat into a god, a machine, and a plum tree, and each metamorphosis inches us a little bit closer to Bukowski's vision of the cat's essential nature. Each comparison is a little slant; it doesn't make perfect sense that a plum tree is "final," nor does it make sense that a plum tree is like a cat, but we still feel what Bukowski means instinctively. It's a great simile because it's unexpected and brief and strange and oh so right.

When Bukowski walks the cat out of the poem beneath "porticoes of [his] / admiration," we see the cat one last time, sashaying through a temple of worship, as preening and pleased with himself as any Roman emperor or Greek god.

I swear, this cat could have been Diego.

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startled into life like fire


By Charles Bukowski

in grievous deity my cat
walks around
he walks around and around
with
electric tail and
push-button
eyes

he is
alive and
plush and
final as a plum tree

neither of us understands
cathedrals or
the man outside
watering his
lawn

if I were all the man
that he is
cat--
if there were men
like this
the world could
begin

he leaps up on the couch
and walks through
porticoes of my
admiration.