The Life Principle, More or Less (Response Poem)

February 2, 2014

February, by Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,  

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries  

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am  

he’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,  

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,  

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,  

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here  

should snip a few testicles. If we wise  

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,  

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over  

again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing  

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits  

thirty below, and pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries  

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

The Life Principle, More or Less

Lazy morning. Clouded

sky. For now the cold outside is kept at bay

by the fat, seeping furnace. I wake,

I stretch, I creep upstairs, lightly

taking my place on the empty side of your bed.

You are still breathing. I don’t know how

you do it – it could be a week, a year,

a century, and you would read the same books,

leave the same dishes for washing

tomorrow. I settle

on your chest and I feel the weight

of your own body

crushing you,

the knowledge

that this is all there is, isn’t it,

licking the salt of old French fries

off your fingers, wishing and dreading

someone would come to share them with you. But I

have known this longer than you, so when

you push me off, I slink away in my dark fur

to stalk Winter itself, follow the pink and anguished

yowling of females in heat into the alleyway

to rut in the streets. I scratch

those who scratch me. I hide and wait

and pounce and tease before snapping

the small bones of a neck. For you

I drag back these little dead things, these

trophies of ferocity and survival,

not out of gratitude, or pride, but only in the hope
of teaching you what all cats know

and what you will not learn:

that the hunger doesn’t go away

even after you’ve been fed.