Cats in Windowsills Notwithstanding

Is there anything that is absolutely still, utterly without motion?

The modern scientific theory

Of an expanding universe

Contends “no.”

Transcendent and beautiful though they can be,

Cold and heartless are Father Time and Mother Nature,

Indiscriminate killers who are ultimately responsible

For the death of every living thing.

Mother Nature plays with the very building blocks of the earth

And then, suddenly, becomes destructive, volatile, impulsive,

As if consumed by that hollow feeling

That comes from destroying one’s own creations.

…But, such is the imperfect character of fallen nature.

Father Time guides with one hand

The pendulum of a grandfather clock,

Seesawing to and fro in a neverending arc,

Until that pendulum gradually begins to resemble

The sweeping movement of an old, grey scythe.

…But, time is just a man-made, logical construct,

A cosmic yardstick of sorts,

By which is measured the beginning of a state

And the end of it.

We have metric measurements for just about everything…

So why don’t we have metric time?

(Shhh! They might hear you!!)

Among the flowers and plants, however numerous,

Brambles run wild and abound

And the serpentine ivy snakes and meanders its way

Around an old red-brick wall

In the garden of regret.

Somewhat diffused in the miasma of vapors and haze,

And set against the disquieting, fragmented afternoon sky,

The indifferent sun

Shines with a stony, foreign light.

And the small, nebulous garden,

Deafeningly silent,

Is an ethereal one,

Practically a terra nullius incognita … empty, unknown earth.

And the only plant that seems to flourish

Is the Chinaberry tree.

On writing "Cats in Windowsills Notwithstanding"

The assignment was to write one that in some way broke with my conventional writing style. I generally don’t write particularly serious poems (or at least I didn’t, at the time). The poem is a “top-down” metaphor that begins with broader concepts and gradually contracts (narrows down) to a single image at the end.

The poem circles around three main ideas: nature, time, and creation. The title is actually a tongue-in-cheek answer to the question of the first line (‘is anything completely motionless?’) though that’s not made clear. Time and nature are both described in their personified states (Mother Nature/Father Time) and are seen as murderers. The joke about metric time is meant as ironic. Then time and nature “converge” and the scene shifts to a strange garden where time doesn’t exist, nature is distorted, and even the sun doesn’t give life.

The unknowable nature of the garden, and the feelings of “regret” associated with it, all culminate in the image of one plant—the only one that is growing well and thriving, a Chinaberry tree. In literature, the Chinaberry tree is used symbolically as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil … in the Garden of Eden. So the poem basically ends with how the Garden might look today if someone saw it. From the fall of man (original sin) also came the fall of nature to its imperfect state. And the manmade construct of time goes against what was originally supposed to be timeless and perfect.