The Cat Circus
I do not travel slowly,
not like poets leaning
against ornate bridges
expecting nothing of the day
but for the ancient ripples
of shallow rivers
to tangle along beneath them.
And not like united siblings,
one visiting a city whose ashy age
and confidently crowded stretches
he never thought he’d see,
sipping tea across from his newfound sister
and made uneasy by the waiter’s knowing smile.
And certainly not like those silver haired
adventurers, padding safely in herds
behind a bilingual guide with a neon flag,
heading past a few sights before
an authentic dinner at 5:00 and another
lumpy night on foreign beds.
I zipped, a blur
past storefront windows.
I wore shoes thin and spread
the bones in my feet wide,
I made my feet broader.
And some of my pictures
are streaks of grey stone
that might be Gaudí’s peaks
or might be Notre Dame’s
screaming awnings eluding
my American shutter speed.
Rather than linger at the toes
of coy marble angels,
or pause to study the studies
of paintings we study, I brought
a breeze to the backs of many
a weary museophile, turning even
the head of Holofernes with the ridiculous
oddity of my wired pace.
I hurt things, like a cord or a spring
on the inside of my right leg,
and something to the left of my spine
that still tightens when I sit too long.
Yet I digested things well,
every flake of morning pastry
and drop of all those late-night beers
spent as fuel for my marathon tour
of things old and beautiful,
those glimpses I caught
while waiting at bus stops
or after braking to pick up my
wind-tossed maps.
It isn’t that I didn’t want to be there,
but that I wanted to make sure
to have been everywhere.
And at the beginning
of that last week,
after mailing home a deck
of photographic whiplash,
a tinny reprimand made its way
through miles of ocean-braving wire,
so that today I have my mother to thank
for that picture that hangs on all our walls
of me, the old man,
and his three performing circus cats
on a street corner in Nice.
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