Introduction to Barbara A. Holland's "The Secret Agent"

Barbara A. Holland died in 1988. For most of the years between 1973 and her death, I was her principal book publisher (under the imprints of The Poet’s Press, Grim Reaper Books, and B. Rutherford Books). During the intervening years, I have kept most of her chapbooks and books available, some in print and some on-line.

After 31 years in the keeping of the McAllister family in Philadelphia, the poet's notebooks and papers have been transferred to The Poet’s Press. The objective is to find an archive that will maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital form. The present volume is the second product of this project, as we have begun to catalog and scan the papers.

Approximately 200 printed magazines containing Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s have been scanned.  Some of these may be added to the Collected Poems edition published in 1980; others will form a separate, large Collected Poems, Volume 2.

Astonishingly, the trove of typed manuscripts contains five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar “warhorses,” are largely made up of poems no one has seen outside of their appearance in obscure magazines. An enormous folder of “Old Poems” spans from the late 1960s  up to as late as 1987. If possible, I intend to see each of these manuscripts into a print and/or digital edition before the papers are archived. Holland published, by her own account, in more than 1,000 small press and literary journals, making her one of the nation’s most prolific published poets.

Medusa: The Lost Chapbook was the first new book published, in August, 2019, with the full text of Holland’s first published chapbook, plus some selections from notebooks and manuscripts.

The Secret Agent

The poems in this cycle are unique in Holland’s output. They are not “magazine” poems, and only a few could stand alone as pieces to perform at a poetry reading. Like Rilke’s Duino Elegies, they are metaphysical reflections on self, on the nature of reality, and even of religious conflict. A number of the poems reflect a deep engagement with some form in Hindu theology, and the poet’s attempts to conform herself to the selfless submission this belief-system seems to require. She chafes against it, and two mysterious personae help her oppose an immersion in that world: one or more unspecified lovers or objects-of-love who distract her with worldly passions, and the Secret Agent, who remains always at the edge of vision. He watches her; she senses him watching, studying. He is “on the case.”

As Holland weaves in and out of this struggle, some of the poems make direct reference to Vishnu and Shiva, and to Hindu ritual. Found among Holland’s notebooks are many pages of detailed “study notes” on the Hindu world-view, and specifically on Vishnu and Shiva, who would continue to haunt the poet’s work for the rest of her years.

One might ask how a classically-oriented female scholar, living in New York in the early 1960s, came upon this line of study. The likely answer is that she, along with many others on the East Side arts scene, fell under the sway of Abhay Charan De Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977), who, working from a Lower East Side storefront, attracted young devotees, including (briefly) poets like Allen Ginsberg, to his lectures and events. In many poems, Holland refers to chants and mantras, and describes her state of mind during their performance.

I suspect that she became an ardent student of a man she took to be an authentic master. Her notebooks may be the fruit of attending his lectures, or of guided study sessions. She refers in one poem to her “Hindu dancing master” and that would seem to describe Prabhupada, who was the only conspicuous swami in the Greenwich Village arts scene.

Rebellion against the teacher, who perhaps treated women with less patience than he did his male disciples, comes to light when Holland rankles about her difficulty assuming the lotus position, and her teacher snaps, “Just do it.” The poet writes in her notebook that she had no difficulty walking away from the male Christian deities, but that she would miss the figure of the Virgin. I suspect that “The Secret Agent” was Holland’s working out of her hesitations, and her liberation from, the seductive Eastern teachings. Once they were no longer literally true, and no longer required her active participation in rituals, they could be employed as pure myth, the tool of every poet.

Prabhupada was not just another visiting swami. He was the founder of the Hare Krishna cult, inverting the traditional Hindu pantheon and making Krishna supreme over Vishnu. The mantra that Holland was being taught was the very one that became an object of mockery when the Krishna cult spread, its followers became robotic cult members, and, some years later after the founder’s death, arrests and prosecutions showed the sinister underbelly of the movement. At heart profoundly unintellectual, the Krishna cult sought obedient followers, not questioning scholars.

In any event, it is hard to imagine our West Village Sybil, Barbara Holland, roaming around the streets of Manhattan in saffron robes, clicking finger-cymbals, yet she indeed confesses to taking part in just such a ritual in her poem, “Krishna in the Afternoon”:

One of my many selves

sits on the grass

with the children,

driven by wonder

at the marvels that come

through our eyes, to sing

in the chapels of our heads.

Where the two brows

come together, perched above bridge

of the nose as a bird,

Krishna alights,

and the sun on the cymbals

burst with him on the darkness

we have yet to break.

Suddenly, wind rises;

the finger-cymbals are stilled.

I am another self

with a workaday tomorrow

and today, as the death

of my incense, grown down

to the burning of my hand.

Who, or what, is the Secret Agent? For this we turn to the art world, and to the paintings of Belgian surrealist René Magritte, one of the poet’s abiding passions. Magritte admired mystery stories and films about secret agents, especially the Fantômas film series, and was fascinated with Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the mystery genre with his detective Dupin in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

When I interviewed Barbara in 1986 for our new edition of her Magritte-themed poems, I was unaware of the Secret Agent cycle. The poet had included “Close Call for the Secret Agent” in her Magritte cycle, and of that poem she said that it was her pursuit of Magritte’s personality. “I wanted to find out what kind of man he was, and never did figure it out,” she recalled. The poem evokes the many pictures of bowler-hatted men who stare straight at you with mask-like inscrutable faces. Magritte’s paintings, The Menaced Assassin and The Month of Harvest come to mind. The Menaced Assassin contains visual elements from a Fantômas film of 1913.

Rene Magritte. The Menaced Assassin. 1927.

As Holland investigated Magritte by studying his paintings and reading monographs about him, she also then allowed The Secret Agent to investigate her and her state of mind. The poems do not form a consistent narrative despite this, and the Secret Agent, Vishnu-Shiva, and The Loved One form a tripartite dance. All we can do is to provide context for the psychic struggle contained within its pages. The many striking lines and beautiful images make it worth the trouble, just as many readers delight in Rilke’s poems without ever quite knowing what he was getting at.

Since Holland returned to her original roots to write many poems that place her inside the psyches of sorceresses, witches, the Gorgon, the prophetess, and the Sybil, she definitely made her choice. When the followers of the Krishna cult purchased land in West Virginia and many left New York to join them as dutiful drones of the land, Holland stayed behind, true to her Muse. Or she may already have turned her back on the course of training.

I knew one poet who actually made the trek and bought a little cottage adjacent to the Krishna settlement, but I suspect he was attracted by the nubile young women in saffron robes. The actual life inside the Krishna cult would send any sensualist fleeing. The Master required that only married couples had sex, only once a week, and only after five hours of chanting. Although Krishna had coupled with 10,000 girls, there was to be no hanky-panky in West Virginia. The disappointed poet returned to his abode in Brighton Beach.

Two poems suggest to me that Holland made a clear break with the Master. “The Cart of Jagganatha” describes the festival of Ratha Yatra, held each June or July in Puri in the state of Odisha, India. The ceremony honors Lord Jagganath, a syncretist god who is “Lord of the Universe,” taken as a form of Vishnu. This god, who is not anthropomorphic, has no arms or legs, and would have appealed to the poet’s interest in Chthonic mythology. Three enormous chariots, almost literally rolling temples, appear in the ceremony. As the largest chariot gains momentum from being pulled by a thousand or more devotees, it becomes unstoppable, and and any person or animal straying into its path can be crushed; hence, the term “Juggernaut.” Holland’s poem describes the ceremony approvingly, and she tries to place herself uncritically among the devotees. The Hare Krishna cult adopted the figure of Jagganatha as part of their iconography, so the identification with the group is emphatically made in the poem. This is as close to a “membership card” as we can come.

A poem from Holland’s “Old Poems” folder, however, presents the same festival in a different light. The typescript page has no name and address and therefore was not typed for submission to a magazine. “The Festival of Ratha Yatra,” appears to be a rebellion against the entire Krishna version of Hindu myth. The poem begins with the only ALL CAPS lines in any of her poems:

It all means NOTHING

WHATEVER;

                       these three tall temples

                       of crimson canvas

mounted high on their wheels

and superbly phallic,

which hallow only

the sacraments of wind that ripple

in their walls beneath

their saucy pennants.

We all become the Lord

of the Universe together

in the long flow of our stride

that takes us nowhere . . .

Later in the poem, Holland writes “Hurry, Krishna/ Hurry, Krishna,” mocking the sacred “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna” mantra by mispronouncing it. I do not think the dancing master Prabhupada would have been at all amused. She saved herself, and even if the occasional Loved One in the poem cycle was of little use except as a reminder of the body’s urges, we can thank the Secret Agent for his lift up and out, as the personification of her rational, skeptical alter-ego. Indeed, Holland wrote, about this time, a short poem, “Celebration of the Self,” a nod to Whitman but also an anthem of confident egoism. If “The Sound of the Tinkling Cymbals” is Holland’s baptism into Krishna Consciousness, “Celebration of the Self” is her self-expulsion, sword in hand.

Poems from Notebooks and Manuscripts

For this section, I have turned to Holland’s hand-written notebooks, and to the large “Old Poems” typescript folder. The poet’s hand-written notes are mostly preliminary sketches, often a dense block of lines, not yet broken up in any kind of meter or breath-phrasing. The same lines might appear on several successive pages, re-ordered but still with little hint of what might become a typed poem for submission to a magazine. A number of these were coherent and polished enough that I felt them worthy, especially as they demonstrate the poet's attempt to take everyday journal ideas and develop them.

Thus, from some notebook sketches, I have “constructed” poems. Some needed only lineation and punctuation, and since I often worked with Barbara on the final appearance of her poems in print, I did what I always did. I know her style and her voice. Where they were untitled, I invented suitable titles.

In the process of editing typed manuscripts, I have also done what any book editor would do, which is silently to correct misspellings, to replace words where another word was clearly intended, and in a couple of places, indicated with square brackets, to insert a word that I would have persuaded Barbara to add or substitute. I have added a few footnotes to help the general reader.

Lens, Light, and Sound

The poems in Lens, Light, and Sound were published as a stapled chapbook in 1968. Among Holland’s friends in the Boston area were author and illustrator Edward Gorey, and Boston-based photographer Donald Curran, and, later, Jack Powers, a poetry advocate and organizer who founded Stone Soup Poetry Magazine, and brought her into Boston’s open reading poetry scene. The poems in this collection were intended for a book with Curran’s photos and Holland’s poems on facing pages, but that project never came to pass. The chapbook may have been printed as a handout for Curran’s photo exhibit, which must have reached California, since the book was printed in Los Angeles.

There are some fine poems here that stand on their own. Others suffer, as any ekphrastic poem must, from not having Curran’s photos in view. I can find no trace of Curran or his work online, other than several photos that appeared in Stone Soup Poetry magazine. The one photo that matches a poem in this set is included in this volume, reproduced from the pages of the magazine.

“Portrait of Lazarus,” “Stars Over Grove Street, “and “The Sybil of Cumae” are three powerful poems that create their own imagery, and it is hard to imagine a photograph as rich. This group of poems also made a good practice run for the large cycle Holland would write based on Magritte’s paintings. Several of the shorter poems employ rhyme, revealing Holland's early attachment to T.S. Eliot.

Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn

During her early years in the Greenwich Village poetry scene, Holland met two women poets with radically different outlooks and techniques. Ree Dragonette (1918-1979) and Emilie Glen (1906-1991) ran poetry salons and mentored and encouraged young poets. Both featured Barbara at their salons and introduced her to a wider circle of poets, editors, and publishers. Dragonette was a linguistic high-wire artist with a Maria Callas-like presence who had performed with jazz musicians, and I have always believed that Barbara perfected her style under Dragonette’s shadow. Dragonette acknowledged this; Holland generally denied it.

Emilie Glen, who had a fifty-year stint as a full-time poet, knew the ropes of getting published in little magazines, and she almost certainly tutored Holland in how to compile lists of publishers, to submit queries, and to mail out poems on an almost industrial scale. Glen had published thousands of poems, and doubtless Holland wanted to achieve the same ubiquity. Glen was an avid bird-watcher and had a ready market for her poems about birds and the Central Park coterie of bird-watchers. She also loved cats, and placed hundreds of poems about real and imagined felines. Her forte was the urban short narrative poem, inhabiting the voice of a single character.

I find in Holland’s notebooks a number of attempts to write about cats. They are tentative, almost phobic. She describes cats as creatures she attempts to approach and understand, but she never writes about a cat from the inside. She seldom succeeded in writing the kind of narrative poem from inside a character that was Glen’s forte. Holland is an opera mad-scene singer, a Roderick Usher, a sensitive plant, a receiver of signals, all nerves. She can inhabit Medusa, a Sybil, Melusine, or Eurydice, but the story is already a given. As wonderfully evocative as her Medusa poem is, for example, Medusa doesn’t do anything. She lists her annoyances, urges the hero to lop off her head, and then laments that it will be worse when she’s dead. It’s very much a stand-and-sing opera aria.

She did not need to compete with either of her mentors/rivals, for she honed this style to perfection.

And yet … in her notebooks I find her trying for an extended narrative, in sketches for, of all things, a cat book. “The Flying Cat,” exists as sketches only, not in polished form. It has more than 30 sections, most with blank facing-pages, one section per page. At first glance, it appears to be an attempt at a children’s book. The sketches are not yet poems, and they do not rhyme. Yet this is not a children’s book: some of the details are gruesome, such as the description of unwanted kittens being drowned. The un-named woman who owns the flying cat is dreadful.

Just as the Secret Agent poems seemed to reveal themselves in the context of Holland’s time and place, “The Flying Cat” makes perfect sense as an attempt to sketch a Gothic faux-children’s book in the manner of her friend Edward Gorey, whose ghastly little illustrated books were a sensation in the 1960s and 1970s. Barbara and I were both avid Edward Gorey fans, and we talked about him many times. She may have had a mind to persuade Gorey to illustrate “The Flying Cat,” had she found a publisher. The difficulties were that, first, she did not write rhymed verse like Gorey’s, whose text was full of Edwardian whimsy and camp humor; second, she let her plot trail off and never finished the story. She ends it abruptly after her Flying Cat leaves home, has several adventures, and then returns, to be taken to the veterinarian to look at why his wings have failed to grow as he matured from kitten to tom-cat. If it was to be a book in the Gorey vein, some calamitous ending was required.

Faced with this tantalizing fragment, I had two choices. I could leave it for future scholars to pore over in the Holland papers, or I could attempt to edit and complete the work in the Gorey vein. I have done the latter. In a poet’s frenzy, I edited, “overwrote,” and added to Holland’s original. The story is complete, and Buster, the flying cat, comes to his terrible end. In the Gorey manner, I changed the title to “Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn,” and made Barbara Holland’s name into an anagram, “Abadon Barr-Hall.”  This has been a light-hearted diversion in the midst of a somber enterprise, charged as I am with making what I can of a great heap of notebooks and papers. It is not the best of Holland, and it is not the best of me, since I did not feel empowered to do more than a pentimento over her original, and then completing the far edge of the canvas. I hope it gives pleasure.

Selected Supernatural Poems

To close this volume, I have selected some of Holland’s most notable supernatural poems, the best but by no means all. These are some of her warhorses, the poems with which she made her mark at readings all over the Northeast. Some were included in my anthology, May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poetry (1975), and others in the collections, In the Shadows (1984), and in Crises of Rejuvenation (1974). These are the Barbara A. Holland poems that can make your hair stand on end.

This series will continue with more never-published complete book manuscripts, more poems from notebooks, and more than 200 poems that appeared in little magazines that were not reprinted in her published books. We will also include reviews of Holland’s work so that those interested in the reception of her work will see what has been done thus far.

— Brett Rutherford

Pittsburgh, PA

August 26, 2019

Buster, or the Unclaimed Urn

This is a posthumous collaboration with Barbara A. Holland. It is included in the new Poet's Press book, The Secret Agent.

BUSTER,
or The Unclaimed Urn

An Un-illustrated Book
by
ABADON BARR-HALL

1.

A well-pleased gray cat gave birth

to a litter of fourteen little kittens

whose eyes were as yet unopened,

and who spent most of their days

crawling all over one another

while batting those who climbed over them

with their tiny paws, and sucking

the fresh milk form their mother’s side.

One was a very special cat, not like

a cat that anyone had seen before.

Which one of the fourteen was he? We’ll see!

2.

Then one day the lady who owned

their mother decided she only wanted three,

and would give six away to people

who would love them. And she would drown

the other five, for who would be

expected to take home so many kittens!

Too many, no matter how pretty

they all might be! Was he to be one

of the Chosen, or the Drowned?

3.

So the lady chose which kittens

she wanted. Most you could not tell

what gender they were as yet. Two were girls,

for sure, and one was a boy, and he was a noble

little thing. As pretty as anything could be.

Wasn’t he the lucky one?

The doorbell rang. The visitors came.

They picked and chose and argued.

Even his mother was taken away.

The rest were scooped up. The toilet flushed.

Now he was the only one left! Just one!

4.

A voice in a tall shadow named him “Buster.”

Buster was gray, silvery-gray

on the legs and back, gray on the back

of his head and his ears, but his face

was white, and he was white beneath

the chin and his chest and stomach,

and he wore white socks. What kind

of cat was Buster anyway, all this-and-that?

5.

Buster paid court to the woman,

big hands and shadow, loud voice and all.

He was hungry a lot.

Buster would wake the lady up

in the morning by licking her face

with his tongue. He patted her cheek

just ever so gentle with his paws.

Buster had to pretend to like her,

or he would never get fed.

6.

Then came the day when the lady noticed

that he was fat for a kitten. Some sort of lump

stuck out at each side of his head,

and his forelegs met at two bent shoulders.

“That’s not what a cat

is supposed to look like!” she muttered.

Whatever could be wrong with Buster?

7.

So then one day, when she was playing with him,

her fingers slipped along his sides

and she discovered that he had WINGS,

two little furry wings which fit him perfectly.

They were gray on the backs

and as he flapped them open,

they showed clean white beneath them.

Whoever heard of a cat with WINGS?

8.

Buster’s head drooped on his chest.

She had discovered his secret.

Now she would drown him too,

for she hated everything that was not nice,

anything irregular or lumpy or out-of-shape.

He knew from what she said that he —

he was the only one of his brothers

and sisters and kittens of uncertain

gender, the only one for sure with WINGS!

He had another secret, too. He had WINGS,

and he knew how to use them!

9.

Would she hate him now? Would be be drowned?

The lady seemed delighted. She crowed.

He lifted his head and looked straight at her.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Show me.”

Flapping his wings slowly, he showed her,

how up and out they opened, and flapped.

WINGS were to show you are happy.

10.

Each morning, he would get up,

stand on two legs as tall as he could,

and stretch his wings out, out and up.

He would set them shaking.

“Go ahead!” she encouraged him.

She laughed and he walked and fluttered.

Then down he went, like a common house-cat,

and all he could do was utter a faint meow.

The reward was a pat on his neck

and a trip to the bowl in the kitchen.

“My little eagle!” she crooned. “My little eagle.”

11.

One day the windows were all-the-way open.

He walked to the far wall, then turned

and raced toward them and spread his wings

and FLAP, FLAP, FLAPPED

and he found himself flying out the window

just like the birds who fell by accident

and always seemed to come back up.

Now he knew their secret, too: up and out,

then down and up again! Imagine,

a cat with wings. No one was ever

going to drown him! And he had a world to see,

and his whiskers thrilled and trembled.

12.

Cats are no more curious

than any other animal,

          but a cat’s WHISKERS

are like a personal radar.

Buster’s seemed to feel about in the air.

They looked eager to understand.

Buster let the soft plume

of his tail stand straight up tall.

Now he could fly straight. This little thing

would make a difference.

Wings out, tail up, here comes BUSTER!

13.

He came and went from the house

without the lady knowing it —

she liked the window open,

and so did he. Back in the house

he was hearth-kitten, ears up and ready

for the sound of cat-food, for whatever sounds

were there to be heard, nose twitching for

fresh smells of clean litter and Lysol.

He did his duty when the lady entered.

“How is Buster? How is the little eagle.”

Flap-flap-flutter-meow, he would answer.

He rolled on the floor, this way, that way,

wings tucked neatly under, resting up.

14.

Daytimes, when the lady went to work,

he had all the outdoors to investigate.

One night, on the window-sill, he heard

things he had never heard before,

a far-away fluttering, calling, the night,

the opal eye of the big moon,

so he slipped out the window

         and flew away.

She watched him do it. She ran to stop him.

She cried hopelessly,

for she thought he was gone for good.

No one was safe at night in the city!

Would Buster come back? Would you?

15.

But he was only just down in the garden,

three floors below where the ground-floor tenant

had roses (ouch!) to land on, soft ferns

and a catnip patch much visited by felines

of every conceivable shape and color.

There, he learned new ways to catch food.

16.

There were big ailanthus trees

all around the garden. They smelled terrible,

but up in their spiky leaves a person who flew

could get lost, or stay hidden

where no one would ever find them.

Among the flickering leaves at night,

only the eyes of the ones up there were visible.

Can you see BUSTER in the high trees?

17.

And there, one night, on a high branch,

he met a new friend, The Owl

(What owl? Who? Don’t ask an owl his name

because he’ll never tell you. Who will suffice.)

He doesn’t talk much, anyway,

looks wiser and smarter than he actually is.

Turning his eyes this way, that way,

all he is thinking about is, probably: mice.

And that was just fine with Buster.

Buster loved mice.

18.

Buster knew one way only

to catch a mouse: a slow process

with no promise of getting anything,

just crouching in front of a hole

in the lady’s baseboard, and waiting.

It had been hardly worth the trouble.

Out here, the mice were everywhere.

They ran about like crazy people

looking for their own food. Careless,

they never saw Buster crouching

and certainly never saw The Owl

as he swooped down on them.

19.

Buster and the Owl, the Meow and the Who,

came up with a method to hunt together.

They’d hide among the leaves,

     The Owl, watching

     Buster, with his big ears and radar whiskers,

          listening. They made

a game of it, to see who could slide out

of the twig-end of the low branch first

and land on the back of the prey.

One mouse for you, Mr. Owl. One vole for you,
     Mr. Cat! The chipmunk is on to us.

A rat? A rat we can divide between us!

20.

Exploring the neighborhood by daytime

Buster would see bats like empty bags hanging

from the doors of old garages.

There goes one he frightened with his paw-prod:

no bigger than a mouse

but with a wingspread many times wider

than its little body.

Ah, Buster, marveled. If a cat can fly,

why not a mouse, a flying mouse.

These Buster would not eat:

          he respected them.

21.

Birds! Oh to catch a bird!

Birds, after all, despite their prettiness,

devoured one another. One giant hawk

swooped down and made off with anything

its talons could carry: rabbits and birds,

chipmunks, and even a toy poodle

(to that, Buster said Good riddance!).

Buster wasn’t good at catching birds.

He had been brought up for stalking.

22.

On a long flight

that nearly exhausted him

he came to a pond, and to a bird,

a lordly bird on stilts. The Heron

nodded a little and then resumed

his absolute stillness.

Buster saw fish, red, gold and brown

move aimlessly around the heron’s legs.

How do you catch fish?

     he asked the Heron.

Hours and hours he stood and waited,

     the Heron explained

until the fish ignored him.

Then he’d jab down with his long beak

and come up with a neatly-skewered fish.

Buster did not have a beak,

and the water, which he tried,

was cold and chilling. Pads of his paws

could tread on water, he could dart

and flutter and try to catch fish,

but no, Buster was not getting wet,

the way the lady sometimes had tried

to make him cleaner and fluffier.

No way, Baby, no way

is any self-respecting cat

going to lurk in the water

on four short legs!

23.

He spent the summer

in the trees with all the varied birds

(they finally came to be unafraid

once he announced he couldn’t catch them

and didn’t like the taste of feathers, anyway.

Well-fed on mice, he was growing.

He started to feel that time was passing.

He was bigger, stronger, longer-legged

and sleek, but something was wrong:

Buster’s wings did not grow with him.

They were just the same size

as when he first kitten-flew

and made his great escape.

If this kept up, he would not lift himself

to the treetops anymore.

24.

On one final flight to see how far, how high,

how much of the city he could explore,

Buster flapped up to where a high wind

grabbed him and took him up high

     the dizzy-up where the hawks went.

His mouth wide, his whiskers extended,

tail up to guide him, he soared the skyline.

Towers he saw from above, rooftops and ladders,

windows and fire escapes, twisted iron ropes

of river-spanning bridges. Sharp edges, high

spires jabbed at him. If he fell here,

the city below would skin him alive.

25.

Buster was dizzy. He had gone too high.

No one should see their high places upside-down.

His wings were tired. He dropped

onto a window-ledge some thirty floors

above the street. He looked below

and almost belched a fur-ball. He looked

to both sides: nothing, just other windows

and no way to get to them.

What would become of Buster, thirty floors up?

26.

This was no place for a cat at all.

Changing with three feet like any other cat,

he tapped with one forepaw

     against the window pane.

Buster was frightened now.

He remembered how The Owl had warned him:

Fur is no replacement for feathers.

He had lost his nerve for leaping.

Too high, too far,

        to the unforgiving pavement.

And no time to wonder if The Owl was wrong.

27.

Not every wind is friendly. New ones swirled

around the building, and lashed him.

The pigeons he shared the ledge with

kept nudging him, afraid

he would bother their little nestlings.

Move over, they said, or fly back

     to where you came from.

So Buster’s ledge-hold became

a paw-and-claw tango.

If Buster fell off, could he fly up again?

28.

Inside the window a woman typed,

click-clickedly-clack, all the while Buster

was going tap-tappedy-tap at the window-pane.

He tried his loudest meow. The woman

looked up. She stared at Buster

in wide-eyed astonishment.

He kept one paw up

against the glass, as if to wave.

She didn’t seem to see his wings

outstretched in desperation.

Instinct took over. She raised the window.

Into her two arms he leaped.

“Oh kitty!” she murmured.

“How did you get here, thirty floors up?”

Buster gave her his most

    consoling and grateful purr.

Soon the woman and her boyfriend

went off to the elevator (a car that went up
and down without a step or wing-beat!),

Buster held tight in their hands.

The door opened and closed.
Another man got on.

Cat-whiskers knew they were descending.

What would Buster’s new friends do with him?

29.

Buster shook out his wings, just in case.

The stranger’s voice bellowed, “What’s that?

What are you doing with that huge bird

on this elevator?” “It’s a CAT,” the secretary

told the loud man, lifting up Buster

to the man’s steel-gray eyes and moustache.

“He landed in fright on the window ledge.

We’re bringing him down the street,” explained

the young man. And Buster purred.

30.

Man, woman and cat emerged

into a noonday crowd below.

She petted Buster. The man’s hands

began to tighten around Buster’s

middle. His wings felt squashed.

“We’re going to make a fortune on him,”

the man said. “We need a big cage.

I have a friend at the zoo. We’ll be famous!”

And then in a burst of light and wind

they were outdoors. Buster went limp.

The woman yelled “Taxi! Taxi!”

With teeth and claws and wing-beat

Buster attacked the man and broke free.

He heard them screaming far below.

He was going home. He was fed up with flying.

People were no good, but at least

he had a place to be a hearth-cat.

His little wings had served him well enough.

31.

The lady’s window was open.

When she saw Buster, she was so glad

she even sang a song. Never had he seen

so much milk, so big a bowl of food

(no mice, but what could one expect?).

She held him and held him,

and then she noticed. “Your wings!

They seem to be growing shorter

as your body grows bigger and bigger.

I wonder what a vet would say?”

32.

To say he did not like the “cat carrier”

was putting it mildly. And what did Buster

know about this creature called “The Vet”?

“These are vestigial wings,” the Vet explained

as his gloved hand held Buster expertly.

“This is a full-grown cat you have here,

fully matured. He’s a full-fledged tomcat now.”

The woman paused to take that in.

She wrinkled her nose.

“How can I deal with that?”

“We can remove the vestigial wings,

so he’s less likely to run into danger.
God only knows what he did while he was out there.”

“Remove them? You mean a surgery?”

“Yes. Since he means so much to you.”

“Of course,” she gulped. Numbers they talked,

and then they went aside and whispered.

All Buster heard was, “The other thing

we can take care of while he’s out.”

33.

Babyhood, childhood, adolescence, all

were now in Buster’s past. He was a new thing,

something they called a tom-cat. Did this mean

no more hunting for mice and voles and rats?

no more night-watch in tree-top with Mr. Owl?

Buster waited in a small cage.

Another cat, an orange tabby, howled

and meowed in the next cage.

They talked. The orange fellow — Max

was what his owner called him —

was here for an operation, too.

“Just you wait,” Max said ominously.

I know what they do here. It’s my turn now.

They’re going to cut me down below.

I will no more go out a-prowling. No lady

cats in my future. And I will grow

immensely fat, and be pampered.”

34.

“I’m here for something else,” said Buster.

He flapped his wings to show what he meant.

“Harrumph!” said Max. “That’s fine enough

to have a bird-part removed. Who needs it?

But no one leaves here without being snipped.

It’s a conspiracy, and the Vet is a monster.”

Buster had always wondered

what the she-cats and he-cats did in the alley

that made so much noise. His life as a cat

was about to be terminated.

All the lady wanted was the idea of a cat.

Buster decided he would rather be dead.

35.

Buster was pierced with a needle, and then another.

His vision spiraled down to darkness.

His wings were carved off, the stitches applied.

“While he’s asleep, let’s do the neutering,” a voice said.

He heard it even though he was numb. His legs

no longer answered his call, and his whiskers

told him nothing, either. He even heard them breathe

when they hovered over him.

Buster meowed once, and took a death.

Twice and thrice, he meowed again —

           he had the knack of this dying thing.

Still his heart beat. He twitched and meowed

           life four, life five, life six

               there they go

          (are you sure you want to go through with this,

               Buster, no more mice ever?)

          life seven, life eight,

               meow your lungs out to give up the ninth.

“We lost him, Doctor!” the assistant reported.

“He went into seizures and we lost him.”

36.

The lady was furious

when they told her Buster was dead.

“I’m not paying for that operation,”

she shrieked, “since all you did

was kill my poor kitten.”

“You can come get the body,” they told her.

“What would I do with it?”

“We can cremate Buster. You can have a nice little urn.

There’s a pet cemetery in Queens.”

“That sounds … suitable,” the lady told them.

37.

Buster’s remains went into a furnace.

Black smoke went up, a pile of ash

sank to the bottom,

all that remained of the noble cat.

A small bronze urn, engraved

with BUSTER and the single year

of his birth and departing,

was filled with the ashes.

No one ever came to claim it.

38.

The lady cried a great deal,

but then the winter came,

and she was busy at the office,

and there were the holidays,

and then a trip away,

and come spring

the only thing that bothered her

was that an owl kept coming

to her closed window, tap-

tapping on the glass and looking

at her. She had a dread

of owls and didn’t know why

it kept tapping and peering,

tapping and peering.

After a while.

the owl stopped coming.