The Critics Interrupt Their Interpretations
of “Un Chat en Hiver” for a French Lesson
_____________________________________________

“A cat in the river,” she mused—half-right. “Like us, a little
thing in a place wilder than what we can control.
Rather like life, no? Bad luck, fate, karma—whatever
always sneaking up to pluck our whiskers
to restring God’s violin.” “And God’s no classicist,” he smiled.
“At best a gypsy fiddler on the dirt path between two towns
in the moonlight.” She said, “A cat in the river, crying
like a violin in the rain, the notes bending as the strings get wet.”
“En hiver,” he repeated, “the river forked like an h, not”—
he pointed out—“like you’d expect, like a y. It’s all,
as the French say, very interessant.” “Un chat
en hiver,” she began again. “Perhaps more like a chat
by the river, like ladies in hoop skirts in a Seurat,
sitting on blankets on the riverbank, talking, eating sandwiches
with the crusts cut off.” He said, “Yes, but also an admission
of hopelessness, as if to say life’s bigger than we are
no matter what you say down by the river.
You know . . . Che Seurat, Seurat.” (Oh, like a joke,
she thought, only not as funny.) “En hiver, en hiver,”
he sighed. “If the river is fate—fate being what it is—
then the river is endless. It began long before we did
and ended there too.” “Always a fucking Existentialist,”
she said, thumbing through the dictionary like a woman,
he thought, thumbing through a dictionary. “Shit,”
she said. “It’s a cat in winter. The river’s just what we imagined
it to be, only it’s not there. And a cat in winter . . . I’m not sure
what that’s like.” “Oh,” he said, “it’s not so bad,”
and the snow fell all night like shredded photocopies of snow
on a thin white cat.

by Matthew Thorburn, from Subject to Change, New Issues Poetry & Prose
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