Bodies are despotic toddlers.
While lovers and dreamers pluck harps about hearts, atria and ventricles are stubbornly physical.
No volume of poetry can coax the body out of being so dang…bodily.
Curled in our computer chairs, you and I have the luxury of forgetting our flesh. Cats would trade this posh privilege for squeeze-cheese.
Once again, we are both infuriating and inscrutable. Why would anyone ignore their own incarnation? If you have been given paws or armpits or hilarious chin hairs, how do you stop marveling at your own meaty magnificence? You are here upon the earth, weight and speckles and nebula nubbins. You occupy space. If you consume sufficient squeeze-cheese, you can occupy even more space.
We hear the body throw a tantrum, but cats hear a symphony.
This is the case even among cats whose castles need a bit of restoration.
With a name meaning “light,” Photini is first in line to be Poet Laureate and Visiting Scholar of Tabby’s Place. She is brilliance by any definition, quartz sparkling under midday sun.
If it looks as though she has been clobbered by the entire crayon box, that’s because no color could convey her glory alone. She is the queen of the fairies, the chancellor of Tabby’s Place University, the muse of the angels.
Yet she is anything but ethereal.
As physical as a platypus, Photini is ecstatic to be assembled from the earth. While I reach for the spice cabinet to describe her, the lady of light interrupts me: “I am the many colors of mud! Soil is sacred! Earth is ecstasy! Poultry is also ecstasy!”
You might think our skeletal senior would prefer to forget her body. Animal Control found Photini starving and alone, age rampaging her vessel like a herd of hooligan years.
Fluid cursed inside her innocent chest. Hunger scrawled Beastie Boys lyrics on her belly walls. The technicolor lantern-cat had an exceedingly large heart. Seizure-like activity scattered her dreams.
Her body was bawdy with bad news.
Given the same script, I know what I would do. I would huddle on the couch in my hoodie with three pudding cups, stream Mr. Holland’s Opus, and attempt to forget my physical person.
But cats are proud to be people.
And you don’t get to “be people” without things like paws, and pancreases, and pain, and pleural effusion. No problems, no pudding.
The lady of the light is not missing out on the pudding. (Here she accepts poetry, “pudding” being a timeless allegory for “giblets.”)
Photini’s dangerous heart is part of her story, and the tale is worth its twists. She does not begrudge her cavernous chambers, any more than she seeks to snip out her past.
She is thrilled by her nerve endings, the better to be stroked. She is besotted with her tongue, pink president of breakfast. She hears her oversized heart’s beat, and she sears the darkness with life’s light.
The shadows are long whenever the light is large, but it falls behind her as she falls into step with the day. This day. The only day in which her stripes and our sinews are guaranteed a duet.
How could we ignore these arms and eyes and improbable hours?
I would like to power through the poem. I wish I had the power to promise us that it ends well:
Photini
Our queenie
Lived twenty more years
Photini
Knit beanies
For all who had fears
(Photini’s silent body is a far better poet than my brain.)
But the only power we’re given is the power of neurons and nebulas, muscle and moon-dust.
Large hearts and gouty feet and crinkly foreheads and kinked tails are us. We get to be here together, in the flesh, to squeeze and squint and shelter each other with arms and fur and fullness.
We don’t know how long we will have with Photini. We will treasure each hour, each color.
Photini is the many colors of life. We are the many children of a Great Mercy. We are incandescent and incarnate. We are touch and truth, large hearts with large hearts.