Sunday
Mar. 24, 2002
The Cat
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Poem: "The Cat," by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from These Are My Rivers (New Directions).
The Cat
The cat
licks its paw and
lies down in
the bookshelf nook
She
can lie in a
sphinx position
without moving for so
many hours
and then turn her head
to me and
rise and stretch
and turn
her back to me and
lick her paw again as if
no real time had passed
It hasn't
and she is the sphinx with
all the time in the world
in the desert of her time
The cat
knows where flies die
sees ghosts in the motes of air
and shadows in sunbeams
She hears
the music of the spheres and
the hum in the wires of the houses
and the hum of the universe
in interstellar spaces
but
prefers domestic places
and the hum of the heater
On this day in Memphis, in 1958, at about 6:30 in the morning,
Elvis Presley
arrived at the draft board on South Main Street in to be inducted into the
army. He arrived wearing dark blue trousers, a gray and white checked sports
jacket, a striped shirt, and pink and black socks. He said, "Millions of
other guys have been drafted, and I don't want to be different from anyone else."
It was on this day in 1955 Tennessee Williams' play
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Morosco Theater in
New York. It starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Margaret, Ben Gazzara as Brick, and
Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
It's the birthday of playwright and actor Dario
Fo, born in San Giano, Lombardy, Italy (1926). He's the author of irreverent,
anarchic, satiric plays-more than 70 of them-including Accidental Death of
an Anarchist (1970), We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay! (1974), and One
Was Nude and One Wore Tails (1985). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1997.
It's the birthday of poet and publisher Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, New York (1919). In World War Two he
was the commanding officer of a submarine chaser at the D-Day invasion. He moved
to San Francisco in 1951, and, along with Peter Martin, founded the City Lights
Pocket Book Shop, the first paperback bookstore in the country. The store became
a center for the Beat movement, and published Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl,"
for which Ferlinghetti was sued for indecency. His book A Coney Island of
the Mind is the largest-selling book by a living American poet.
It's the birthday of the English playwright Sir
Arthur Wing Pinero, born in London (1855). He's best known for his comic
look at Victorian theater, Trelawney of the Wells (1898).
It's the birthday of poet and craftsman William
Morris, born in Walthamstow, north of London (1834). Along with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and other artists, he helped to form the Pre-Raphaelite movement,
based on a love of all things gothic. His poems were often written in a medieval
style. His turned his interest to crafts, and co-founded a design firm that
produced wallpaper and stained glass and furniture-particularly the Morris chair,
with its removable cushions and adjustable back.
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