Hey, that cat is in the basket… We’ve noticed that to expect the unexpected is the only way to be prepared for the realities of life. Poirot ignores baskets and other receptacles like Zup’s brown paper bags and until you get one out to use for something like Easter, delivering bread or just to use as decoration and then, well, it’s game on. He’s in, like Flynn. That, of course, requires a photo shoot and some fun carrying him around in said basket until he’s had enough, which doesn’t take long cause he is a male Tuxedo cat (ooh-pin-ion-ated).
If you wanted to put him in a basket just for fun, he’d have no part of it. Whenever I’m wrapping presents or doing some kind of photography, my other cat, Minnow, shows up “to help.” She’s always sticking her paw into the frame or grabbing at the tape and the paper. Mr. David has to get involved as well. In short, having your supplies laid out for a project means that you should expect chaos. It will happen.
People plan and create in different ways. Some folks use outlines and spreadsheets and paste together collages and other people seem to channel perfection right from their idea engine in their brain down through their arm and out through their finger into the pencil, pen, Apple Pen or brush onto paper or canvas. Art appears where just before there was blankness. I find that I’m somewhere in the middle and that while I do tend to gestate and think over things, I don’t plan on paper or outline my ideas. I work well under pressure, thus “Poetry on Demand” and wood carving in small windows of time. These short bursts are often prompted by something I see, or words I’m given or an inspiring scene from a movie or song that someone is listening to. Sometimes, of course, I do the choosing of those inspirations and sometimes they are thrust upon me.
Sometimes, someone just walks into the room with an empty basket and I jump right in, because it seems like the thing to do. I’ve seen the basket plenty of times on the shelf, but in someone else’s hands, it takes on a different context. So, you see, I identify with these not-so-silly feline actions.
I’ve been thinking about freezing and thawing, the ups and downs, so to speak, of winter. How change is always within our grasp. How we don’t just have to accept the way things are. How someone might just show up with an empty basket and it might be fun to jump right on in. The following is “me jumping in the basket” and remember, the beauty of poetry is that it can always mean whatever it means to you, the reader… and that interpretation is subject to change. Together we can expect the unexpected!
Reach
like a frog brushing its teeth before Winter’s bed.
Antifreeze in its blood forgetful of the time spent in your shadows.
Forgetful of its own song on the edges of Lucky Boy croaking through my backswing. Reach into your stillness, in your frozen mud stagnation. A needle skipping on the turntable. Synapsis firing -- swallowing of the heartbeat’s slow current.
Reaching under the brown leaves frozen to the surface of the once green and tannin-stained pond.
Winter is here. Winter marches on. Reach for Spring. ©Timothy James Stouffer #elystreetpoet 03042026 All rights reserved.
