My Wife's Lovers, by Lesléa Newman

My Wife's Lovers, by Carl Kahler (Austria) 1893

My Wife's Lovers
                                  
Though I am happily married, I must confess
I have fallen deeply in love with one 
Robert C. Johnson who is deeply in love 
 
with his wife, Kate Birdsall Johnson
who is deeply in love with her dozens of lovers
all of whom live together in perfect harmony
 
or so the story goes. And who wouldn’t love 
a man so devoted to his mate he minds not
a whit that she fritters away her livelong days
 
and starry starry nights being adored 
by so many suitors he can barely keep track
of them? All those lusty lovers coming
 
and going as they please which so pleases
Mrs. Kate Birdsall Johnson that perhaps it is 
she with whom I am deeply in love. Then
 
again, I could easily and ardently
fall for Carl Kahler the artist who gave up
3 years of his life to study Kate’s swanky swains
 
before putting brush to canvas to capture
a mere 42 of them which I am counting on
this rainy day in Springfield, Massachusetts
 
where the Victorian painting that measures
6 feet by 8 feet and weighs 270 pounds
hangs before me at the Museum of Fine Arts
 
taking up an entire wall. I stare at the life-size
cats, starting with the Mistress’s favorite,
the dark and sultry Sultan who sits on his own
 
throne-like box smack dab in the middle
of this collection of kittens and cats,
his open-wide emerald eyes
 
glaring at me and daring me to come
one step closer so he can swat me
on the nose with his one white paw.
 
His white ruff is ruffled as though he and Mrs. J.
just had a lovely tussle and now she is off
somewhere outside the painting composing 
 
herself. But wait—it is not husband
or wife or painter I pine for, it is 
the proud and noble Sultan himself, or any 
 
one of his 41 angora adversaries: the lone black 
beauty off to his left, whose yellow eyes glow
like two distant planets in a midnight sky,
 
the tiniest white snowball of a kitten
hissing behind him, one pink ear pinned back,
the ginger-tailed fluffy Persian purring 
 
at his feet about to bat about a fallen butterfly.
I sit among this kingdom of cats for a good
hour until the museum’s closing bell rings
 
and you appear with a grin on your face
and a present from the gift shop: the very last
print of the painting rolled under your arm
 
which makes me love you even more
than my own green-eyed lover waiting 
at home, her food bowl empty, her litter box full.

Lesléa Newman

Lesléa Newman has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and is a former poet laureate of Northampton, MA. Her poetry books include the dual memoir-in-verse, I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father, and the novel-in-verse, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard. In addition to being a poet, she is a passionate cat-lover.