gershon hepner - defining a cat

How can you define a cat
when your uncertainty suggests
its fur acts merely as format
for formulas of feline pests
that may be here one moment
but in the next have got no life?
Cats ought to be above all comment,
like wishful thoughts for Caesar’s wife.

If Caesar had a cat would he
have let it wander like a spouse
whom he, with royal dignity,
afforded freedom of his house?
Of course not, he’d have made quite sure
he always knew its whereabouts,
just like his wife allowed to tour
no further than his downcast doubts.

Richard Eder reviews “The Nimrod Flipout” by Etgar Keret (Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 16,2006) :

The stories in “The Nimrod Flipout, ” his first collection to be published in the United States, come in tiny puffs, as if any deep defining breaths would be inappropriate to a time when air and water are at risk––and definitions of ourselves are too, most of all. How to define a cat if the uncertainty principle tosses up the notion that it may be in two states at once. Keret writes in two states at once. There is a suggestion of Haruki Murakami’s matter-of-fact disjunctions and the calmly droll absurdities of Richard Barthelme. There is a touch of the supernatural and more than a touch of the wry and sententious Jewish folk tale. Call it magical shtickism. In several stories, the best ones, there is

4/17/06

gershon hepner

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/defining-a-cat/