Poem (As the cat)

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

William Carlos Williams mirrors the cat's careful, soft-footed motions in the way it steps from one word to the next, broken but not without form or rhythm. He forces you to pause and consider each word as the cat contemplates its next motion. The syllables fall separately rather than sliding into one another, yet feel more delicate than awkward. Without explicit description, choosing certain words and images but excluding others, he conveys the stillness, silence, and fluidity of a cat in motion.

Again, brief research revealed some interesting interpretations, though few with which I agree. Perhaps in poetry it is safest to see the literal as only a facade, a doorway leading to a far deeper meaning, message, or observation abut humanity. This is the way one online contributor thought, seeing this poem as a metaphor for a young pregnant woman contemplating an abortion, and another who was reminded of Norse legends of  the Midgard Serpent and the apocalypse. Perhaps their interpretations reveal more about the reader than they do about the poem, though that can be said about any way of thinking.

As a cat owner, I do not see an enormous serpent or a potential mother. I picture my own cat, climbing over the things she shouldn't with an oddly careless carefulness. The step into the flowerpot at the end seems unusual, and it inspired many of the symbolic interpretations I read, but I first see it as a wonderfully cattish thing to do. It is a careful, delicate action, as is the rest of the poem, but into a rather indelicate location. Cats see everything as a place to lay, sleep, sit, and step. The concept of a flowerpot being for stepping around, rather than in or on, is alien to them, and within a handful of lines Williams captures that peculiar, particular freedom.

I find it more likely that Williams wrote this poem after watching a cat do this very action, perhaps in his own home or someone else's, than that he