A Cat in an Empty Apartment
by Wisława Szymborska (1923 – 2012)
Die?
One does not do that to a cat.
Because what’s a cat to do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls.
Caress against the furniture.
It seems that nothing has changed here,
but yet things are different.
Nothing appears to have been relocated,
yet everything has been shuffled about.
The lamp no longer burns in the evenings.
Footsteps can be heard on the stairway,
but they’re not the ones.
The hand which puts the fish on the platter
is not the same one which used to do it.
Something here does not begin
at its usual time.
Something does not happen quite
as it should
Here someone was and was,
then suddenly disappeared
and now is stubbornly absent.
All the closets were peered into.
The shelves were walked through.
The rug was lifted and examined.
Even the rule about not scattering
papers was violated.
What more is to be done?
Sleep and wait.
Let him return,
at least make a token appearance.
Then he’ll learn
that one shouldn’t treat a cat like this.
He will be approached
as though unwillingly,
slowly,
on very offended paws.
With no spontaneous leaps or squeals at first.
—
This is my favourite Szymborska poem. It’s a beautiful account of a someone’s loneliness and longing. Some say she wrote this after the death of her husband.
I first read this in my 1st creative writing class under another poet, Chingbee Cruz, a long time ago. Szymborska, who died of cancer at 88 last week, was considered Poland’s “guardian spirit” . She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
