Daisy Fried, author of She Didn't Mean to Do It, and winner of a number of poetry awards, periodically goes to Paris, Madrid, Rome, or some such place, to spend a month or two, and when she does so, she leaves her cat, Mister Buster, with me. Right now, she and her husband, Jim, are in Florence, Italy, and Mr. B. has been with me since mid-December. As Buster is a poet's cat, he knows how to walk into my poems. The following is the last Buster-inflected poem of the previous visit:

Buster's Radiator Song

The bathroom radiator is only
five pleats wide; not wide enough for the cat
to lie comfortably stretched out across
it, so he must pull himself into him-
self, and still his head must remain raised, like

the Sphinx, or, if he grows drowsy, as will
inevitably happen atop a
warm radiator buffered by a towel,
it must droop down sideways over the edge,
his eyes squeezed against the light I write by,

in my mind still the melody of that
song the clear-voiced melancholy Cuban
sings with his agéd mother, her voice
crackling like a 78 rpm.

How Mr. Buster was able to walk into that poem, you can easily see: I write in the bath; Mr. Buster is drawn to the event by the thundering of the water pouring into the tub; he perches atop the old-fashioned accordion-like radiator; I often write from direct observation, so Mr. Buster assures himself a place in my poem. The "melancholy Cuban" I refer to at the end is Silvio Rodriguez, an album of whose I had just received as a gift, and the memory of that particular song floated through my mind at the end of the poem.

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One of the first poems in which Buster appears during this visit features him in more of a cameo role:

Twenty-nine

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
– I read that, without the first syllable,
the other evening in a New Yorker
review of a new biography of
D.H. Lawrence, and I said, That's Shakespeare,
from one of the sonnets and I snatched up
my copy and read the first line of each
starting at the end until at last I reached

twenty-nine. (Ah, to be twenty-nine once
more! It was a terrible year, banging
out my dissertation in the midst of
apocalyptic certainty that we'd
fight a nuclear war in just two years!)

The cat enters to give me my last line.

Okay, some of my friends have said that the last line is cheating, and I suppose in some ways it is. I require myself to write 14 lines of 10 syllables each. I'd written the octave about the Shakespeare allusion in the New Yorker article, then 5/6 of the sestet on a digression sparked by the number twenty-nine, and then I had one line lacking. Literally, the cat walked in the room at that point and I realized describing the entry gave me the ten syllables I needed. However, my ever-present critical faculty – well, not ever present, unfortunately, but that's another story – rescues me to suggest that the obsessiveness of hunting down the Shakespeare allusion and the equally obsessive apocalypticism of two decades ago are both resolved in the calm focus on the present that the cat represents.