The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder, by Richard Katrovas

The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder, by Richard Katrovas (USA) contemporary

The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder

an ekphrastic for Karenmaria

Dumpy, coiffed mane dyed unnaturally black
And shaped mannishly to her mannish face
As though she’d handed a pic of fat Elvis
To her hairdresser and said, Just like that. 

Striding through five-thousand steps at summer dusk
I must say, “Prosim. Muzu?” and she pauses,
Turns, smiles—the most un-Slavic thing to do
In public—and I click two photos in which

The cat on her shoulder peers into my soul,
No easy task given that I do not 
Possess one, or if I do it is elsewhere,
Or perhaps it is astride my shoulder

And that tabby-and-white, on a gray pillow
Draping the left shoulder of the black shirt,
A red leash dangling from its collar, stares
Into my phone though maybe it stares

Into the cat on my shoulder I can-
Not see or feel though once I tried to walk
Fat Ophelia, bought the proper harness 
But she would not enter thus the world astride

My folly, would not accompany Ella
And me into the twilight of ten years
Ago, and Ella, now fifteen, sardonic 
To the bone yet deeply decent, her heart’s

Only impurity the hubris of youth
And its glory the repudiation
Of all claims to purity, laughed at me
When she was five, laughed at our fat cat,

Our terrible tortie named for a martyr
Of Great Literature, and laughs at me 
Now, from time to time, because the sky at
Nine p.m. is bright in summer, and cats

Ride the shoulders of goddesses who will pause
To have their photos taken in Prague Four
At dusk, and she laughs at me because my soul’s
Protector is Nerval’s lobster, that beast

Of nonexistent burdens that crush the heart.
“Tata, are you getting married again?” 
She asked last night, referring to you, my love,
Five-thousand, three-hundred and sixty-five 

Miles from here, a pandemic between us,
And I laughed at her, and texted you the pic
Of the woman with a cat on her shoulder,
Her whose familiar is proxy of my heart. 

Richard Katrovas

Richard Katrovas is the author of fifteen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, most recently Raising Girls in Bohemia: Meditations of an American Father (essays, Three Rooms Press, New York: 2014), and Swastika into Lotus (poetry, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh: 2016). A collection of stories, The Great Czech Navy, was published by Carnegie Mellon in 2018. Katrovas’ stories, essays and verse have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, and he’s received numerous grants and awards, including the 2018 Gold Medal for the Novel from the Faulkner Society. His books have been nominated for the Pulitzer, among other awards. He taught for twenty years at the University of New Orleans, and for the past eighteen at Western Michigan University. Katrovas is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, which is going into its twenty-eighth  year.