May 2021
Author's Note: During the summer months I often visit my wife’s family in Boulder, and one summer
while dallying around the stacks in the Boulder Library, I found a copy of Lucien Clergue’s (1934-2014,) Eros
and Thanatos; one of his collections of (b & w) photographs, and found the image for the following poem.
Later, (in correspondence,) Snodgrass had noted the poem and the use of cat—and other animal—bones in poems,
including his own “On High,” (APR, 32:3, 2003,) which I would suggest to anyone interested in animal imagery in poetry.
Stranded Cat
The cat in Lucien Clergue’s Eros and Thanatos
Lying on the beach at Sainte Marie-de-la-Mer
Is only a half-decomposed corpse filled with sand.
The body resembles a piece of macabre iconography,
A stone transi with some fur still left along the spine,
Down the striped tail curled like a long finger
As though to summon another image, here, it is
The photographer, Lucien, to make posthumous
Meaning, a look, a life story—
She must have wandered out during low tide
Pawing for shellfish on the sand bar and there
Dallied too long, or in the lulling monotony
Of the salty air, napped, and dreamt of crustacean
Fantasies prancing past in improbable shapes
And floral colors. Her jaw, open and fixed
Suggests she woke too late and cried to breathe
A final request, ignored, the oral cavity
Holds the amber froth like a cup of champagne,
An offering for the anger of the sea, the sudden
Tide, a coastal storm, an outburst, and the body
Molded into the sand as though to deny
Destruction, the rigid image of the thing,
A white eye, a necklace of foam, another
Form that requires dissolution and absence,
The water becomes gentle as the hands of Antigone
In this moral dream of nature – itself dreaming
The personification of the scene by the shore—
So far as wind and water and sand agree
To focus in the production of being’s text,
The burden of animation and the void
For an onlooker to accept these views, anger
Alone, or benevolence to cancel the original image,
Then all complaints are unjust and retracted—
The cat in Lucien Clergue’s Eros and Thanatos
Lying on the beach at Sainte Marie-de-la-Mer
Is only a half-decomposed corpse filled with sand.
©2021 Michael Gessner
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