Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson

Author:Bill Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

LA FONTAINE’S VERSIFIED WALKING TOUR: MADEMOISELLE LENORMAND, FORTUNE TELLER

A fatal curiosity attaches to cat kind:

We’re victims of the constant question, Why?

But all the interrogatives that clutter up cats’ minds

Grow pale beside the human need to pry.

Yes, all the niggling wonderings that make us blindly jump—

For looking leaches leaping of its mirth—

Are more than amply magnified within the clods who stump

As bipeds on the byways of the earth.

It wasn’t, after all, a cat, who at the snake’s behest

Devoured the fruit that spread the primal stain.

And neither did some feline felon smash Pandora’s chest,

Thus loosing on the world what it contained.

Cats are disinclined to guess the ending of the tale:

They let the future take the path it likes.

Humans always long to look behind the temporal veil,

To see what’s coming at them down the pike.

Now, here lies one whom Joséphine—Napoleon’s amour—

Engaged to tell her what the cards foretold.

She shuffled them, she laid them out and then began to purr:

“No hunger written here. No need. No cold.”

It was so. That trio never spoke the empress’s name,

Till on the day she drew her final breath:

Then hunger, need and cold rushed in to stake, at last, their claim.

That’s death, my dears. That’s death. That’s death. That’s death.

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