It's quiet here. The cats sprawl, each in a favored place. The geranium leans this way to see if I'm writing about her: head all petals, brown stalks, and those green fans. So you see, I am writing about you.
I turn on the radio. Wrong. Let's not have any noise in this room, except the sound of a voice reading a poem. The cats request The Meadow Mouse, by Theodore Roethke.
The house settles down on its haunches for a doze. I know you are with me, plants, and cats—and even so, I'm frightened, sitting in the middle of perfect possibility.
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"Interpretation in this case has to do as much with the author’s historical context and (contextually-bound) poetics as it does with the gist of a phrase, a line, or any semantic or aesthetic unit. The tricky thing is to enact the poem within the scope of the interpretation. It is this tension between interpretation (contextual meaning) and performance (the gesture, the gist) that constitutes a translation."
