The Cats of Rome (a litter of 14 sonnets) by MTC Cronin

The Cats of Rome (a litter of 14 sonnets)

Winner of the inaugural ArtsRush poetry prize in 2002

and we here, watching documentaries
where they call wars, times of
tension, where vertigo contains the
reasons for feeling, where you can
catch the energy of Leonardo da
Vinci in your mouth depending on your
appetite (where things are gradual and the
ultra-right seduced by cannibalism); here
in the distant space between imitation and
life where we are hoping money can
buy that element of existence on which
individuality depends never noticing that
irregularity is full of desire in this Alex
Pope halfworld of fools

and the many-headed amanuensis
watches advertisements in her
painted nails changing their colour
as often as she is told, in the flickering
light her skin like stretched glass, hot
and showing the soul, fingers
tapering her off into the shock of
hardening air – but do not find in her
Medusa, no snakes but the future close
as a new language, her thoughts, cleverly
dead, letting a paragraph wriggle out
of her mouth: “My plans for being myself
tomorrow night remain unchanged, but
you are not the sun

and I am not the moon” and Pluto
we are informed was discovered in
1930 – where it was before that is the
subject of conflicting reports from eye-
witnesses with bad memories, with
memories like nostalgia, Spring in
Autumn (orange groves?) and
farewells from the platform – mystery,
with her inscrutable fire, has burned all
the pages before scientific discovery
for prior to the beginning of the
nineteenth century it was believed
female orgasm had to take place
for conception to occur

and the newsreader said “The
incident was as dramatic as it looks
in these pictures” and we stare with the
flattered eyes of those who have come
late to telling lies about the imagination;
now there is no way of knowing who owns
the bodies on the screen – the voice-
over accompanies us to the bathroom
where we let the water run (“We have the
rights over artificial mice”) – and if
the knowledge of our age is empathy,
we are ignorant; this day is a day wholly
within the hugeness of itself: if you close
your eyes you’ll miss it

and how could we not live here? after
the leftovers have sat for three days in
the fridge I throw them out; imagine if it
happened to our coastline?; my husband
and I don’t speak for days over the brand
of a television – here with our cheap
mports, here where we’re warning fans
to watch out for fake souvenirs (for
good quality fake souvenirs), and I go
to a gym for five hundred a year because
I don’t know what to do with the fat in my
wallet… with supermarkets so full they
have to stay open 24 hours a day; with
the security of my door

and the wolves are sleeping but have
left 10 000 footprints on the way to
their dreams: at work I ask Brendan
in the printroom, can you do me 10 000
copies before you leave (he is retrenched)
– at all times we are speaking (white
takes what is not white from black so black
remains) and I want him to know that the
universe stops with every man, this
discourse of stars – it’s half a word we
speak to a well-bred person; when it gets
inside it becomes whole – this is a proverb
about proverbs… and at night for 10 000
nights I dream of dreams

and pilfering the manners of
civilization; an army of gorillas
dancing in the jungle past, dinosaurs
in my hair and a plane, like a splinter,
entering the sky and in the next seat a man
inserts his words into 10 000 feet of mid-
air:”It’s not a fucking kite you know, they use
dogs in the cockpits – to train pilots, to bite
them if they touch the controls” and we
circle the sphere of modernity but
keeping our cutlasses sheathed against the
piracy of necessity, against the
privacy of necessity, keeping secret
our inability not to consent

and it is belief that is relevant – the man
did not rape a woman who was into S
& M – a shifting paradise where we
thrash about like babies fallen off the
breast, like the fertility of men; we can
suspend ourselves above wars we know
about, above mountains fascinated by the
wind, rising up to meet its rapid hands; for
us the indignity of being touched has
become a sepulchral monument to
persons whose bodies lie elsewhere,
we see each day as the shadow
of a hair, so thin and faint that it
is almost beyond observation,

and have forgotten our surprise
at being here, building regular
castles that are tall and leaving town
in trucks loaded with the culture of the
inhabitants when cracks appear in the
towers that are so far away from heaven;
we give accounts that are based on
a false story, at best, metaphorical, and
wherever we settle we are jealous
of our landscape; in it our existence
leaves things behind – that wear like
noble metals – while it tarnishes
readily on exposure to
air… has no future

and every day I walk through the
same rooms; every day I go to the
same job; every day I look different
and get married to a bad man in a white
jacket who has an egency for spite and
fantasy and shame (not to mention
jealousy!) and who leaves me
smiling and afraid of having a baby
taller and prettier and more like a
princess and the birth renders me
speechless like having your Uncle
Dick round at Christmas and you
have to sing because he can
sort of play the piano

and the time has come to admit
that all those years I was secretly
reading for plot… and plotting to read,
trying to speak -“I would have changed
everything!”: old roads would close
and take on a different status; sentences
would become easy to define; “Lives of
the Saints” would be banned; and black
women would silhouette the window;
all superfluous ideas would go
in a book that nobody would buy and
when people read the word”sneeze”
they would sneeze; you would be
sure it was not a ruse

and that you saw it as it was; most
importantly, getting shafted would
become better than nothing and
nobody would be able to tell the
difference between panache and a
spinach pancake… a ticklish intention
in this new world might be to say”Well I
might go out today and get killed”, because
that is what happens, isn’t it? and
isn’t it always the way that everyone
always has an explanation for why the
world is going down the plughole – scene,
act, agent, agency, purpose, people
are just naturally greedy

and two-eyed and full of passion and
prejudice (but so is a camel and they
are legally classified as tame animals);
and of my friend who left last June? – I
only ran into him once and all he could
say was “Can you put this in my arm?”
(he is an animal also tamed); it seems
one first person experiential account is
given greater credibility than the strangely
quiet mass of death that lives in
information, and maybe this is right
and that we know at all is wrong but
all that’s left to ask is what was I doing
before that I did not know

and because knowing would have
changed it into something else? My
fears in retrospect are that you can only
explain a number by pointing to another: I
turn to see a black-eye riding on a train,
swollen and alone, not going home and
realize that in the moment of my greatest
grief I must console; every word is in some
way a curse to someone – see the tight-
rope walkers fall, the sawdust full of cries –
and I cannot justify the goodness of my
ife, here, but can only say that I, like
the cats of Rome, have a right to
live where I am born…

©MTC Cronin