It's Still Life

The Old Woman, the Cat, and the Apple Tree of Chaos
(Old Fashioned Chaos)

1. The Tree’s Heresy

The apple tree,
drunk on starlight and spite,
heaves its roots like Cetus, a sea serpent of soil—

thunk against the fence,
crack through the patio,

its fruit rolling into the neighbour’s garden
like tiny, rosy planets
escaping orbit.

The cat
(still not hers, never hers)
watches from the windowsill,
lashing its tail in 7/8 time:

“Call that expansion?
I’ve seen better big bangs
in a dumpster behind KFC.”

2. The Old Woman’s Lament

She shakes her shovel at the sky—
“Hesiod lied!
Chaos wasn’t primordial—
it was this.
This exact blooming tree!”

The crow drops a worm-eaten copy of Pandora’s Box
onto her head.

“And then the fence fell,
and lo, it was not good.”

3. The Cat’s Theorem

The cat, DPhil in feline Astrophysics,
(observational and theoretical astrophysics),
licks spacetime off its paw, and proclaims:

“The universe isn’t expanding,
it’s just shedding …
like me in spring,
but with more dark matter
and fewer hairballs.”

The apples,
now fermenting in the compost,
bubble up a drunken chorus of 3 blind mice:

“Told you so,” they sing.