Oh, I should read this-- this one's--
Michael Cuddihy published this poem
and said nice things about it, so I'll read it, too.
It's called "Prosper in the Twilight."
The rat makes her way up the mulberry tree, the branches
getting limber and risky up close to the fruit,
and she slows.
The berry she is after--
I should tell you Christopher Smart was a famous mad man.
Almost all of his life they kept him in,
and this is in the 18th century where they kept people
with mental trouble in chains and beat them and tortured
them.
It's the line, "they tortured me with harping irons, which
is a barbarous practice for I am more unguarded than others."
He wrote every day two lines of poetry, one based on the Bible
and then one an answer to the Bible.
He wrote the greatest cat poem ever written
to his cat, Jeffrey, as part of this long section.
In one section he's talking about colors.
He talks about all the different colors.
There's a quotation from it about what he says
about white and about purple.
Wonderful, gentle, ineffectual, brilliant man
who had a sad life.
The rat makes her way up the mulberry tree, the branches
getting limber and risky up close to the fruit,
and she slows.
The berry she's after is so ripe there's almost no red.
He thinks of Christopher Smart saying
purple is black blooming.
She lifts her mouth to the berry, stretching.
The throat is an elegant gray, 1,000 shades, Christopher
wrote, among the crazy people.
1,000 colors from white to silver.