Cat at My Front Door Looking In by Peter Cooley

The trees are very unhappy to be trees,

unhappiness along my street, ancient live oaks.

Just like people, they long to be something else.

No one asked a cloud to be a cloud

or me human, a man. I’d rather be

this mockingbird, his backyard plangencies.

But since like you, reader, I’ll reincarnate,

can’t I be one of the neighborhood’s feral cats?

All right, I know we don’t get to choose the text.

Just yesterday I caught Great- Grandpa Cooley

red streak, a wind, wound-red at my window.

I guess he was a stalwart cardinal,

my heritage, crossing my eye ten seconds.

Trading glances, we shared eternity’s instants.

I had clear premonition of what’s next,

but not today, not this year. I’m not ready yet.

A native of the Midwest and a graduate of Shimer College, the University of Chicago and the Writers’ Workshop at University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D., Peter Cooley has lived over half his life in New Orleans; he was Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University from 1975-2018. He has published eleven books of poetry, ten of them with Carnegie Mellon. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and in over one hundred anthologies. His eleventh book of poetry The One Certain Thing appeared in 2021. Cooley was an Atlantic Younger Poet, the Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the recipient of an ATLAS grant from the state of Louisiana and of the Marble Faun Poetry Award from the Faulkner Society in New Orleans. He was Poetry Editor of NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW from 1970-2000 and is currently Poetry Editor of CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE, Professor Emeritus at Tulane University and former Louisiana Poet Laureate.