The Cat and the Fiddle
By Mary Swander
Hey, diddle, diddle, the cow
jumped down, the whole kit and
caboodle, and you the moon.
Driving north from town, Galway City,
Whit Sunday, Auntie May at the wheel,
you didn’t know what to feel,
the windshield black and cracked,
the little tuft of fur caught
in the wiper. Poor dumb beast,
Auntie May slammed on the brakes.
The bovine slid from the bonnet to ditch,
switched her tail into the air
to signal the end of danger.
Your whole life seat-belted and strapped,
you never set out without the tire check,
map, extra blanket, jack and flares.
You never pulled all-nighters,
but thumb grasped to pinkie, be prepared,
read ahead to a fault, Descartes
breaking apart before the sun
came out to shine on Plato’s cave.
And here, you knew a moment before
she flew, the Tom rosining his bow,
the dish and the spoon calling ahead
for reservations. But if there’s
anything to say it’s this:
Sometimes the cat may break
a string, or the dog sink into
a deep depression, but not to relax
and shout for Guinness all around.
At most, pull over and share candy
from May’s pocketbook, brown and worn,
tell jokes of the Kerryman measuring
the miles to Dublin by the number of
pedestrians knocked down. For up a bit,
in another bucolic scene, on either side
of a winding road cut between two cliffs,
a herd of Holsteins grazes on the green
grass, bobbing their heads toward the sea.
Copyright Credit: Mary Swander, "The Cat and the Fiddle" from Heaven-and-Earth House. Copyright © 1994 by Mary Swander. Used by permission of Alfred A Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division ofPenguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.