Remembering Harry

For tonight's blip I present my dear, departed friend Harry, who was the coolest cat ever. Here are his portrait, in which he is sitting on an open recipe book during the preparation of a Thanksgiving feast one year, beaming with his green eye and his by-then-discolored, perhaps blind eye in the Autumn of his life. The picture now rests on a box of his cremated remains, on the mantlepiece in my friend's living room.

In Harry's honor, here's a poem that I once translated from the French, which was translated from Canaque in New Caledonia by the legendary French Anarchist and Communard Louise Michel in the 1870s.

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The Guardian Of The Cemetery
A Canaque Legend

He is there night and day, old Nehewoué, the guardian of the cemetery.

Each rising sun finds him sleeping, exhausted as he is by night work, and the light of every moon sees him stand.

He goes to gather the herbs that conjure: they conjure life and they conjure death.

He knows, old Nehewoué, how to conserve the spark that animates the old man, and he can extinguish the hearts of strong men, just as we suffocate a torch underneath our feet.

From far off, we come to see the guardian of the cemetery and consult with him; with the one who lives with the dead that sleep in the branches and the dead that sleep under the earth.

He hears the sounds that climb and the sounds that descend, Nehewoué the guardian of the dead.

What do the bones say to you, Nehewoué, when they crack in the branches with the wind's breath?

Do you hear the worm in the flesh? Do you hear the eager hawk?

Why have you become powerful and terrible, Nehewoué? It's because you live with the dead, and death is more powerful than life.
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Here is an obituary for Harry, written by the most doting of all his human friends. One thing she doesn't mention is the way Harry would play "paw-paw" (my name for it), which was something like arm-wrestling. I would curl my index finger under his paw and pull, and where any other cat would just let the finger pass, Harry would pull back. It was the feline version of a very firm handshake.