A cat sits on the pavement by the house.
It lets itself be touched, then slides away.
A girl goes by in a hood; the winter noon’s
Long shadows lengthen. The cat is gray,
It sits there. It sits there all day, every day.
A collie bounds into my arms: he is a dog
And, therefore, finds nothing human alien.
He lives at the preacher’s with a pair of cats.
The soft half-Persian sidles to me;
Indoors, the old white one watches blindly.
How cold it is! Some snow slides from a roof
When a squirrel jumps off it to a squirrel-proof
Feeding-station; and, a lot and two yards down,
A fat spaniel snuffles out to me
And sobers me with his untrusting frown.
He worries about his yard: past it, it’s my affair
If I halt Earth in her track-his duty’s done.
And the cat and the collie worry about the old one;
They come, when she’s out too, so uncertainly….
It’s my block; I know them, just as they know me.
As for the others, those who wake up every day
And feed these, keep the houses, ride away
To work-I don’t know them, they don’t know me.
Are we friends or enemies? Why, who can say?
We nod to each other sometimes, in humanity,
Or search one another’s faces with a yearning
Remnant of faith that’s almost animal …
The gray cat that just sits there: surely it is learning
To be a man; will find, soon, some especial
Opening in a good firm for a former cat.
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