Does JD Vance’s Fear of a Childless Cat Lady Planet mean that he wants the country run by badass mothers with dogs? Because, brothers and sisters, that’s me, and I’ve got ideas.
Join me after this poem about how the world works for more commentary on those fool comments about Democratic cats and their childless women.
One End of an Orange Cat
Given the variables it’s odd that
things narrow down one way or
another, but they do.
Reminds me of the man
who had to knock on a door and tell
a woman he’d just run over her cat.
That’s awful, said the woman,
stepping out, as if to see it happen.
The man repeated an apology, said,
Please, let me replace your cat. Well,
the woman nodded,
How are you at catching mice?
The possible variations seem
excessive for the task at hand. Not
only for the story of your life, but also
for the universe as we have it, rather
than the myriad other possible
universes. In both cases, finally,
the way that it is, is the only way that it
is. Infinite potential options; one
single one. Excessive for the task at
hand. Of course, he moved right in.
That’s the violence of origins;
the generative splat of disaster.
He fixes the roof, hauls her ashes,
but can’t find much in the way of mice.
Wonders, sometimes, Why was this her
one condition?
Life can’t have time to hand-pick
all these minute exchanges
so it must be narrative and need, even
narrative need, that creates them, fills
in gaps, replaces our murdered cats.
A baseball game or a day at the desk?
Minute exchanges.
The answering of any question
is an attrition of possibilities.
A replacement, a companion.
Sometimes he sussed the cat itself had
been, at one time, a sorry substitution
for a rotten love, now over and listing
towards forgotten. The story now
about her capacity for abstraction.
The lost love had burnt umber hair,
worked down by the docks. The cat
shows up one day in the woman’s
worst despair and who wants a cat?
But then, she sees his roughish orange
hair; smells fish breath and there you
have it: romance. By the time the cat is
flat, she’d loved it for its own array
of anecdote: the day it caught a mouse,
its extra toes, its appetite, its thick cat
hair on her goddamn clothes.
The central tenant, companionship,
eludes her. In this, she is not unusual.
When looking for lovers we often seek
elements what we’ve grown used to.
Ach du.
The man deliberates upon his actions.
Apparently, I killed this woman’s cat.
It looked and smelled like orange ruffi
and I done crushed it flat.
Now she loves me. I deserve that?
Yet she loves me, or says she does.
It would be nice if she could. I will be
vigilant against the hated mice.
This life is mine.
Man knocks on a woman’s door, one
afternoon in late September.
Air smells of wet leaves and weather.
Woman nods, steps out,
firming a clutch on her sweater.
Each glances over and their eyelids
widen as if a wind had come upon
two butterflies and breathed their
four wings open to new notions.
Minute exchanges.
Jennifer Michael Hecht, Funny (University of Wisconsin Press)
I’ve posted a few poems here from my book Funny, wherein all the poems have old jokes in them. I love this joke a lot. It’s just grammar — English leaves two possible readings of “replace” so when we offer to replace someone’s electric beater, we can buy them a new one, or hand beat the batter. But it also tells us a lot about love.
I bring you this poem today because the scourge of voting childless cat ladies has arisen in major national news. It’s almost as if it is JD who can’t tell the difference between men and cats. I get that both have whiskers and most wait to be fed, but do both hide under the couch? Play golf? Stomp around like God with his foot on fire when they’re in a bad mood? And does stompy, I mean Vance, does Vance not believe that cats have some small stake in this country? He should count them someday. Or I should, just to calm down.
Maybe the goofiest thing about suggesting a person only has a stake in the future of the USA if they have given the country a child is that many people who are deciding not to have children are doing so partly out of concern about climate change, to not add to the problem. The cruelest thing about it is that many have tried to have children and don’t, and now they are being politically diminished for it. The worst thing about it is that it defines women as procreative bodies above all. The worst thing about it is its insult to adoptive parents. The worst thing about it is that it underrates empathy and intelligence. The worst thing about it is that it pisses me off.
The cat ladies aren’t exchanging husband and children for cats, they’re trading husband and children for time and space, the cat is just a little purring thing that walks around in it.
The poem above is trying to say something about love, how it shape shifts but stays in some ways the same as we roam, how it honors its past with its tiny obsessions, in its bittersweet moonlit attempts to find home.
***
Okay my first duck and my last duchess, my loves and my luck, my doves and my darlings, my bold goose and my goosed gander, my truth and my slander, I hope all your hay turns to gold. And of the juice of remaining nameless, what truth did Rumpelstiltskin know that we don’t? Stay hydrated and curious and don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage us again.
love,
Jennifer
PS Come take this class with me on zoom! We can chat about whatever, I’ll be teaching techniques to wake up your language in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. I hope you can join us!