Cheryl Caesar
Ritual
I get up at four
to write my morning pages
already turning to
to-do lists.
Set the coffee on the right,
pen and old blue book on the left.
Laptop in the middle.
Try not to turn it on.
The cats invade. The grey
is holding the lap, the black
melting from the desk like a Dali watch.
I try to keep his fur out
of the laptop which shouldn’t even be there.
Each time the wrist is exposed, he paws it,
she licks it. She tickles. I think they are saying,
Ridiculous human, stop trying so hard
to meditate. All you need is here.
See us, feel us, offering ourselves to you
as Les Glass offered Franny
the perfect sphere of a tangerine,
or Bessie brought a brimming
cup of consecrated chicken soup.
Ritual
I get up at four
to write my morning pages
already turning to
to-do lists.
Set the coffee on the right,
pen and old blue book on the left.
Laptop in the middle.
Try not to turn it on.
The cats invade. The grey
is holding the lap, the black
melting from the desk like a Dali watch.
I try to keep his fur out
of the laptop which shouldn’t even be there.
Each time the wrist is exposed, he paws it,
she licks it. She tickles. I think they are saying,
Ridiculous human, stop trying so hard
to meditate. All you need is here.
See us, feel us, offering ourselves to you
as Les Glass offered Franny
the perfect sphere of a tangerine,
or Bessie brought a brimming
cup of consecrated chicken soup.
Cheryl Caesar lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She teaches writing at Michigan State University, gives readings and publishes poetry in the U.S. and abroad. This year, she’s especially pleased to have published poems in Agony Opera (India), Prachya (Bangladesh) and Nationalism, a Zimbabwean anthology. When the world is too much with her, she escapes to books, cats and Michigan lakes, and dreams of a saltwater infinity pool she once knew in Palermo.