Salamander the Siamese Cat

For Vi Jones who wished to hear more about cats.....

Salamander the Siamese cat
introduced itself (non-specific gender)
into my novel one day,
when I was having difficulty
conveying something between the
male and female leads.

In walked the cat, lithe
and sleek, effortlessly,
climbing silently up the enclosed balcony and
in between the newlyweds,
who were debating the nature
of human existence,
love and war, the
eternal flames of
battle and consequence.

The male immediately saw
an ancient spirit,
embodied in the feline,
descended from the mountains,
because the female wanted to know
how it had climbed so high,
and then she remembered.

At the most infant turn of the
twentieth century (the period
in which I write) there was
intense discussion and high
thinking --- a lot of the seedbed
poets and writers still influence us
today --- much of which crumbled
under the immediacy of the wars
that followed.

Salamander is a reminder
of the past, of natural
grace and instinct.
The female said how she loved
hunting for salamanders with
her brother when she was young,
and the male recalled that
animals didn't engage in
long drawn out battles,
they just assert themselves,
and then it's done.

The male and female
leads came from a superstitious
past where nothing was ever
resolved, and Salamander's clean
instinct and logical grace simplified things
for them, so they
could move forward out of the
gridlock of their circumstance.

copyright Monika Roleff 2005.