Here's a poem forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014), another one I have lumped into the category of "Poems Rejected So Many Times That I've Decided Never to Submit Them to Anyone Ever Again Though I Admit I Still Plan to Include Them in the Collection Which May Be a Mistake." Like "Mrs. Dickinson Waits in the Car," posted a few days ago, this poem drove itself, as I wrote, into a particular form--in this case, not a rhymed structure but a narrative one in which various so-called characters/points of view/imaginary voices react to the title of the poem, which is also the title of an untold story. And I'm sorry that this introduction uses the word "which" three times. Please forgive me.

Girls and Their Cats and Their Stories

Dawn Potter

was the title of a work I composed last night.

beneath the sweetly chimerical blanket

known as dead-dog sleep.

Grammar mattered in this tale,

and Not was its first word.

The story was priming itself to inhabit

the white space around a silhouette.

Yet in my dream I also glimpsed a picture—

a portrait, perhaps, of Not.

What I saw was a door: dark, paint-streaked;

blue-black as a bruise but dense, as if the painter

had concealed the door’s true color

beneath layer upon layer of evasion.

And after I dreamed this door,

I dreamed the second word.

The word was the.

Now the story was donning its allotted garments;

now grammar, in silks and velvet,

had paced its first long strides

down the broad and noble corridor.

For the is an article of faith

binding itself to weary flesh and ancient cities,

even to the ambiguities of hope—

for, yes, now house reaches out to clutch

the’s small and eager hand.

A house, a door, a negative, an article of faith.

They tried to tell a story.

But the only other word, the final word, was that.

No dash, no question mark

no busybody verb or self-indulgent pronoun.

Neither cat nor girl.

No person from Porlock to blame, as Coleridge did;

not even “and then I woke and learned it was a dream.”

Merely, there was no sentence.

            *

Donna’s story:

“When I was a girl I had cats.

In our kind of family my cat was all I had.

Knowing that she was going to purr in my ear

as I fell asleep was a comfort and I felt like

at least something might love me.”

Dawn’s story:

“My mother and I invented long

elaborate tales about a cat whose mother

lived on Pointy Head Street and belonged

to an evangelical congregation called

the Church of the Trap Door.”

Dawn’s other story:

“Not the house that

I dreamed of: where I ran up and up

the endless stairs clutching the cat

to my chest so the cat skinners wouldn’t kill it

and then the cat began wailing howling yowling.”

            *

When is a dream not a dream

but the sentence I never wrote?

When is the person from Porlock

the cat scratching at the door? When

is the door the trapdoor, the cat

the cat killer, the sentence

            the dream?

            *

“Girls and Their Cats and Their Stories”

was the name of the work I meant to write

before I was interrupted by the person from Porlock

disguised as a fragment of Not.

As Auden remarks, Coleridge should have tried harder

to finish “Kubla Khan.” As Auden might have remarked,

cats are a sentimental trap, and here Coleridge interrupts

to mention that he himself admires cats from Porlock

though he usually neglects to feed them.

The Khan remains silent.

No one in this poem forgets

that he slices off the heads of cats for sport.

            *

The person from Porlock’s story:

“‘Girls and Their Cats and Their Stories’

was the title of the final poem she wrote

before she fell silent. And I’ll be honest with you:

nobody likes this piece. It’s an irritant,

a flake of grit in the eye of the tiny public

that adored those cheerful verses

about children and Keats and country hi-jinks

that she cranked out so reliably

and published to such moderate acclaim.

This poem . . . I’ll be honest:

it’s a mess, as if she wasted too much time

poring over literary magazines

while running a high fever.

A shame, I’d say,

that this is what we’re stuck with—

a few maundering flippancies;

a hand with a flashlight groping in the dark,

mistaking the cat

for the bathroom switch.”

            *

(Meanwhile, the door remained shut.

The glow of a streetlight picked out the runnels of paint—

blue-black, scratched here and there as if someone

had picked at it with the tines of a fork.

Under the streetlight, the paint

clung to the door like mud.

A smell of cat rose from the gutters;

and now the rain, which had threatened all day,

began to fall, the first slow drops striking

the low roofs, the blank-faced walls, a slop-

shouldered girl who was singing to herself

as she shoved a lame shopping cart

up the crooked brick sidewalk.)