Polychrome Heroics poem: Cats Are Magic
Nov. 1st, 2019 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanter1944I suppose this could be considered part two rather than one, because Khallo has already appeared, but his poem was meant as a stand-alone when it was written. This isn't. Part two will go up once I write it!
Herein lies absolutely no animal harm, zip zilch nada.
It isn't known
what affected a random small town Wisconsin cat
in such a specific and obvious way.
They'd blame a mutated house plant or something,
the people in Oconomowoc say,
if this cat weren't seen almost exclusively outdoors.
She's clearly cared for -
friendly, fed, free of injury and fleas -
and there never seem to be any kittens in tow,
so it's assumed she's been spayed -
but whoever ostensibly owns her,
they leave her collarless, and they let her roam.
It's odd
how no one cops to belonging to her, really.
The experimental pigments in the paint job
a neighborhood teenager gave his car
are the immediate and most-often suggested suspects
because, so conversation goes,
cats sleep on and under cars sometimes, don't they?
Not that there's ever any visible sign
of paint dried into the animal's fur,
but one, it's pointed out, cats lick,
and for another, given the change she went through,
how could you tell anyway?
She's known to be colorful in coat
long before any variations start appearing,
but from one day almost to the next,
this cat's colors shift.
Her pumpkin orange patches stay precisely as they are,
if they don't actually intensify a smidge.
But her black splotches blanch to the vivid sapphire blue
of black-coded hair in French animation,
and every bit of her white spotting turns, overnight,
from creamy to sunflower yellow!
The few tiger tabby stripes
that mark her as a caliby rather than a classic calico
get colorswept as well, going from brown
to a striking candy apple red.
Her eyes were already deeply green,
and so they stay, and the bright pink
of her nose leather and tongue likewise stick around.
But her telltale tricolor paw pads,
for those lucky enough to glimpse her toebeans,
are soon swirled in unexpected shades, and even her whiskers
have striped themselves in technicolor.
"If she didn't have exactly the same patterns
in exactly the same dang places," says more than one person,
"and if she didn't act just like she's acted for a year now,
I'd swear she wasn't the same cat I saw yesterday!"
But she clearly is that.
It isn't long at all before a human gets a clear look at her post-change
and blurts a bemused, laughing designation
within earshot of family and friends:
"Well look at that! A Rainbow kitty!"
And Rainbow,
whatever her seemingly inattentive people call her notwithstanding,
she becomes.
Again.
Technically.
There are always worries,
when unique colors and patterns appear.
Trophy hunters, go the mutters,
and not in the same way
as when someone's hunting goose or duck or deer.
Snatchers, too. Experiments.
Present-day side show freak-seekers.
Horrible things.
No one's yet managed to lay a finger on Rainbow, though.
That might be her penchant for bolting away from threats,
her teeth and claws
(not that she's commonly a biter or a claw-er,
but she could, theoretically, be one),
the neighborhood watching out for its own,
or just good luck; nobody's sure.
But neither is anybody taking the luck for granted.
The cat hasn't shown any other sign
of super-magic-whatever so far, so,
runs the general consensus,
she needs looking out for.
And it's not like leaving a bowl of kibble on the front steps
for random strays is a hardship.
There are plenty of outside cats, after all.
They keep the mice and the rats
from getting into the garages.
Just so long as they don't start going for the songbirds,
they're fine.
Besides. They're cute.
And so Rainbow strays.
Half the local kids
can't wait to play hide and seek with her
in the falling leaves come autumn.
A fair share of the others
try to play house or tea party or dress-up dolls
with her among the participants -
nope, and emphatically, to that last one,
to the weepy dismay of a little boy who
shortly gets an age-appropriate lesson from his grandmother
on just what games kitties like.
Nope to the nope,
to the wearing of the doll clothes.
She's outta there!
Someone creates a porchside shelter
out of a sturdy, lidless rubber container turned on its side,
a double armload of straw,
some soft felted wool,
and a repurposed window curtain cut to size.
Somebody else encircles half a block's worth of tree trunks
with loose but effective metal flashing,
the better, they explain when asked,
to keep all cats--yes, her, but any cats--from climbing the maples
and either getting stuck, going for the sparrows,
or doing the second and following it up with the first.
A third someone takes to laying snow fence
across the top of the nearest park's sandbox
every night at sundown,
then removing it the next morning.
The less said about the usual reasons for that protection,
the better for all involved.
Some did so before but, after the alterations hit her,
quite a few seniors and lonely younger singles
start making a point of petting her if they see her.
There follow, often, squeaky meow conversations
that tend to leave the humans smiling.
More than the usual number of kitty cats
start appearing in the chalk drawings
on Oconomowoc's residential sidewalks.
A handful of genuine photos of Rainbow
(in full color, naturally)
do eventually hit the Internet.
Almost immediately after the first upload,
a clever soul tags a vacant building's blank concrete
with a smiling cat face wreathed in tiny prisms,
and the art's so good, admits the building's newish owner,
that they just haven't got the heart to paint over it
or scrub it off the wall.
Two days later,
words appear below the sketch,
black stencil letters with their inside spaces,
be there any,
filled in in different hues all down the row.
C E L E B R A T E L I F E
I N
C O L O R !
The quintet of black, brown, copper, pink, gold handprints
soon found marching beneath that line of text
look like, so says a visiting art historian from Milwaukee,
they've been literally handmade in the fashion
that means painted fingers and palms smushed against the brickwork.
No one scrubs them off either.
The handprints, not the hands responsible,
although presumably those also get washed,
because no one ever puts the finger, heh heh, on the responsible parties.
Does she realize she's become
a subtle sort of anti-racism, pro-crayon soup meme?
It's highly doubtful.
She seems, apart from the hyperpatchwork fur,
to be an ordinary cat.
But what's that expression, asks the local pastor,
and his smile's a softly knowing thing,
about entertaining angels unawares?
Not that this cat's any angel, he's quick to clarify,
given the garden patch catnip plant
he saw her sleeping in the other day,
but...
And Rainbow stays.
I'll write up Rainbow the hyperpatchwork kitty's character sheet when I'm less tired. And yes, Oconomowoc really is the name of a fair-sized town here.
Herein lies absolutely no animal harm, zip zilch nada.
It isn't known
what affected a random small town Wisconsin cat
in such a specific and obvious way.
They'd blame a mutated house plant or something,
the people in Oconomowoc say,
if this cat weren't seen almost exclusively outdoors.
She's clearly cared for -
friendly, fed, free of injury and fleas -
and there never seem to be any kittens in tow,
so it's assumed she's been spayed -
but whoever ostensibly owns her,
they leave her collarless, and they let her roam.
It's odd
how no one cops to belonging to her, really.
The experimental pigments in the paint job
a neighborhood teenager gave his car
are the immediate and most-often suggested suspects
because, so conversation goes,
cats sleep on and under cars sometimes, don't they?
Not that there's ever any visible sign
of paint dried into the animal's fur,
but one, it's pointed out, cats lick,
and for another, given the change she went through,
how could you tell anyway?
She's known to be colorful in coat
long before any variations start appearing,
but from one day almost to the next,
this cat's colors shift.
Her pumpkin orange patches stay precisely as they are,
if they don't actually intensify a smidge.
But her black splotches blanch to the vivid sapphire blue
of black-coded hair in French animation,
and every bit of her white spotting turns, overnight,
from creamy to sunflower yellow!
The few tiger tabby stripes
that mark her as a caliby rather than a classic calico
get colorswept as well, going from brown
to a striking candy apple red.
Her eyes were already deeply green,
and so they stay, and the bright pink
of her nose leather and tongue likewise stick around.
But her telltale tricolor paw pads,
for those lucky enough to glimpse her toebeans,
are soon swirled in unexpected shades, and even her whiskers
have striped themselves in technicolor.
"If she didn't have exactly the same patterns
in exactly the same dang places," says more than one person,
"and if she didn't act just like she's acted for a year now,
I'd swear she wasn't the same cat I saw yesterday!"
But she clearly is that.
It isn't long at all before a human gets a clear look at her post-change
and blurts a bemused, laughing designation
within earshot of family and friends:
"Well look at that! A Rainbow kitty!"
And Rainbow,
whatever her seemingly inattentive people call her notwithstanding,
she becomes.
Again.
Technically.
There are always worries,
when unique colors and patterns appear.
Trophy hunters, go the mutters,
and not in the same way
as when someone's hunting goose or duck or deer.
Snatchers, too. Experiments.
Present-day side show freak-seekers.
Horrible things.
No one's yet managed to lay a finger on Rainbow, though.
That might be her penchant for bolting away from threats,
her teeth and claws
(not that she's commonly a biter or a claw-er,
but she could, theoretically, be one),
the neighborhood watching out for its own,
or just good luck; nobody's sure.
But neither is anybody taking the luck for granted.
The cat hasn't shown any other sign
of super-magic-whatever so far, so,
runs the general consensus,
she needs looking out for.
And it's not like leaving a bowl of kibble on the front steps
for random strays is a hardship.
There are plenty of outside cats, after all.
They keep the mice and the rats
from getting into the garages.
Just so long as they don't start going for the songbirds,
they're fine.
Besides. They're cute.
And so Rainbow strays.
Half the local kids
can't wait to play hide and seek with her
in the falling leaves come autumn.
A fair share of the others
try to play house or tea party or dress-up dolls
with her among the participants -
nope, and emphatically, to that last one,
to the weepy dismay of a little boy who
shortly gets an age-appropriate lesson from his grandmother
on just what games kitties like.
Nope to the nope,
to the wearing of the doll clothes.
She's outta there!
Someone creates a porchside shelter
out of a sturdy, lidless rubber container turned on its side,
a double armload of straw,
some soft felted wool,
and a repurposed window curtain cut to size.
Somebody else encircles half a block's worth of tree trunks
with loose but effective metal flashing,
the better, they explain when asked,
to keep all cats--yes, her, but any cats--from climbing the maples
and either getting stuck, going for the sparrows,
or doing the second and following it up with the first.
A third someone takes to laying snow fence
across the top of the nearest park's sandbox
every night at sundown,
then removing it the next morning.
The less said about the usual reasons for that protection,
the better for all involved.
Some did so before but, after the alterations hit her,
quite a few seniors and lonely younger singles
start making a point of petting her if they see her.
There follow, often, squeaky meow conversations
that tend to leave the humans smiling.
More than the usual number of kitty cats
start appearing in the chalk drawings
on Oconomowoc's residential sidewalks.
A handful of genuine photos of Rainbow
(in full color, naturally)
do eventually hit the Internet.
Almost immediately after the first upload,
a clever soul tags a vacant building's blank concrete
with a smiling cat face wreathed in tiny prisms,
and the art's so good, admits the building's newish owner,
that they just haven't got the heart to paint over it
or scrub it off the wall.
Two days later,
words appear below the sketch,
black stencil letters with their inside spaces,
be there any,
filled in in different hues all down the row.
C E L E B R A T E L I F E
I N
C O L O R !
The quintet of black, brown, copper, pink, gold handprints
soon found marching beneath that line of text
look like, so says a visiting art historian from Milwaukee,
they've been literally handmade in the fashion
that means painted fingers and palms smushed against the brickwork.
No one scrubs them off either.
The handprints, not the hands responsible,
although presumably those also get washed,
because no one ever puts the finger, heh heh, on the responsible parties.
Does she realize she's become
a subtle sort of anti-racism, pro-crayon soup meme?
It's highly doubtful.
She seems, apart from the hyperpatchwork fur,
to be an ordinary cat.
But what's that expression, asks the local pastor,
and his smile's a softly knowing thing,
about entertaining angels unawares?
Not that this cat's any angel, he's quick to clarify,
given the garden patch catnip plant
he saw her sleeping in the other day,
but...
And Rainbow stays.
I'll write up Rainbow the hyperpatchwork kitty's character sheet when I'm less tired. And yes, Oconomowoc really is the name of a fair-sized town here.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-02 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-02 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-02 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-02 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 03:34 am (UTC)Purr machine tripod torbie icon, for good reason.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 04:47 am (UTC)Totally inspired by a stray or at least outdoor cat encountered in my hometown one night a few months ago. Calico, by the iffy description a family member gave me of her. There was a squeaky conversation, but alas, no scritchies happened.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 05:58 am (UTC)Now I'm curious. What's *waff*? What a fluffy feline? :)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 05:59 am (UTC)Oh! Sorry, that's a passe fandom acronym for "warm and fuzzy feeling." As far as I'm concerned it's onomatopoetic.
What a fluffy feline might in fact cause waff. ;)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-03 07:35 pm (UTC)Aha, got it! And I think you're right, what a fluffy feline might very well cause waff. Literally as well as less literally, if the feline in question is a cuddler. :)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-04 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-04 01:10 am (UTC)Kitty might just saunter across a driveway or down a sidewalk some dusk, however, and if the dog's not in evidence... :)