For . . .

I should consider our cat Gus
while I watch a tape of the ESPN
telecast of the Tigers
who are after all cats
against the Yankees
who are after all mercenaries
of a most ugly sort.

But I don’t. I consider instead
baseball. And then Chris calls
and I am reminded that we saved
this cat from destruction
and that I am in some sense responsible
for his wellbeing, and I pray for his salvation

because I haven’t seen him since I got home
but there he is when I step outside
flirting on the sidewalk four doors down
with Odette. Gus is indeed the servant of nature,
duly and daily living according to it.
And catting in both senses with Odette
who is deaf but not mute, and very white

where she’s not dirty. He leaps up to catch the scent
of her musk and wreathes his body seven times
around all the tires that she has haunted. When he
meets Odette he kisses her in kindness. Because
she is deaf she doesn’t hear him coming
but that is just how those
who cat around do their business.

For Gus is a Manx cat, and although
he’s never been to Man I have and
his very presence reminds me
of that brilliant afternoon
when Chris and Stella were out on the loose
in Peel looking for a cat to call
the sighting of their own while

I sat in the White House on Tynwald Road
the greatest of funky pubs
watching cricket on the telly
while old timers argued forcefully
and completely pointlessly over pints of Okells
about something of which I had no concept.

Seemingly neither did they,
although for sure it wasn’t cricket,
but the habitues seemed to know
them and what they were arguing about
and then the rains came. Hard.

So Chris and Stella didn’t find any cats
not even in the antique shop where the
proprietress treated them rudely as though they
might have been Yankees and
after enduring her kind inattention

they found me in the White House and
we found the narrow lane where I
had parked the rented Brit Ford and we
hit the road, the same road
the TT races on, back past the Tynwald

and turned right in the by-now seriously driving
rain, toward Foxdale and the Manx SPCA
where there are more Manx than you could
shake your tail at if you had one
(which some of them do)
and met Trevor, all 25 copper-coloured pounds
of him and the nice people there
made clear we couldn’t take him

back to North America. John Perry Barlow,
our Manx at the time, survived
that absence, but took sick in
a foreign place (Sunnyvale)
and died at home in San Francisco. For
Manx cats although the best in the world
are subject to malady.

Gus hopes to take prey among the gophers
who feed upon my onions and cabbage but
they have a chance because he has not yet
learned to go underground like they
and six gophers in seven so escape
although hardly by his dallying . . .

For though he is quick to his mark of any creature
be it gopher or insect, he seems to have his
best success with insects, tenacious
of his point even as to the gophers but
they generally burrow too far down
for there’s only so far down a cat can dig.
(They are not dogs.)

Throughout their native island
(and the two on either side of it) they
are no longer bred for style, or at all,
in honor of their inbred genes which need
be left to their own devices.
Yankees should be so advanced,
but far too many believe in intelligent design.

If you get on the net you can find one
in California for humane and domestic purposes
and a nice cat lady from Sacramento
will deliver him or her to your door
even on the hottest day of the summer

if you pass the eligibility test, and
she will be pleased if you make
a donation greater than asked
and will refuse your offer of
additional funds for her trouble and gasoline.

She travels with a Dane
of the human sort. Which is how
our cat Gus became ours. He was
utterly faithful until Odette
flashed her witchy blue right and
witchy brown left eye at him
and now it seems he’s taken over
several households up and down Ashton Avenue.

“Y’gotta watch them Manx,” is all I can say.
A certain spirit comes about their bodies
to sustain them as compleat cats.
They do not seem to know
any Diety, let alone personal saviour,

But I know not what goes on in the
mind of those cats, particularly not those Manx
and maybe neither do they. For
they are cats of estimable heritage.

And I long to return to that place
from whence they came to see
if we can’t find many more such
remarkable creatures
for nothing is sweeter than their
mixture of gravity and waggery.

When we do return we will be
the politest of tourists
as they pursue their delirious pranks.