© Alain Laboile (3)

Nobuyoshi Araki | Chiro my Love

“When I’d be taking pictures out on the veranda, Chiro would sneak up under my feet. Because Chiro was there with me, the veranda became my personal paradise. When I was taking a shower, all I had to do was open the door and quietly call out to Chiro, and she would come. Until I was finished showering, Chiro would wait by the door. Then, she would step in and take a sip from the tub. But she isn’t there anymore. Even now, I still call for her, just hoping that she somehow appears.”

© Nobuyoshi Araki | Chiro (14)

Anastasia Gkitsi | Pendant la pluie

θα βγω στα κεραμίδια της πόλης
προσεκτική γάτα
με προοπτικές πάνθηρα.

τρελή ξετρελή με την βροχή είχα πάντα
σχέσεις ολοκληρωτικές.

© Melissa Shook

Wislawa Szymborska | A Cat in an Empty Apartment

Die? One does not do that to a cat.
Because what's a cat to do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls.
Caress against the furniture.
It seems that nothing has changed here,
but yet things are different.
Nothing appears to have been relocated,
yet everything has been shuffled about.
The lamp no longer burns in the evenings.

Footsteps can be heard on the stairway,
but they're not the ones.
The hand which puts the fish on the platter
is not the same one which used to do it.

Something here does not begin
at its usual time.
Something does not happen quite
as it should
Here someone was and was,
then suddenly disappeared
and now is stubbornly absent.

All the closets were peered into.
The shelves were walked through.
The rug was lifted and examined.
Even the rule about not scattering
papers was violated.

What more is to be done?
Sleep and wait.

Let him return,
at least make a token appearance.
Then he'll learn
that one shouldn't treat a cat like this.
He will be approached
as though unwillingly,
slowly,
on very offended paws.
With no spontaneous leaps or squeals at first.



translated by Walter Whipple

© Horst Jansen

via Foxes in Breeches

Wislawa Szymborska | Possibilities

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

via Nobelprize.org

Thanks to Dimitris Karaiskos & Katerina Stambolidou

© Nikolay Bakharev

via Foxes in Breeches

Cat Hug

Photographer unknown

© Nobuyoshi Araki | Chiro (13)

Faith Resnick

"People who hate cats, will come back as mice in their next life."

© Jonė Reed

via Foxes in Breeches

© Toshiko Okanoue

via Foxes in Breeches

Grandma's Reading Glass | George Albert Smith

"Cat in the Rain" | Ernest Hemingway

...George looked up and saw the back of her neck,

clipped close like a boy’s.

‘I like it the way it is.’

‘I get so tired of it,’ she said. ‘I get so tired of looking like a boy.’

George shifted his position in the bed. He hadn’t looked away from her since she started to speak.

‘You look pretty darn nice,’ he said.

She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the window and looked out. It was getting dark.

‘I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,’ she said. ‘I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I

stroke her.’

‘Yeah?’ George said from the bed.

‘And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty

and I want some new clothes.’

‘Oh, shut up and get something to read,’ George said.

He was reading again. His wife was looking out of the window. It was quite

dark now and still raining in the palm trees.

‘Anyway, I want a cat,’ she said, ‘I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.’ George was not listening...

(Ernest Hemingway, The Essential Hemingway, "Cat in the Rain", pg 357-60)

Maya Deren & Cat

Photographer unknown | via Foxes in Breeches

Lewis Carroll

"It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that whatever you say to them, they always purr."

Grace Coddington & Cat

Photographer unknown

Grace Coddington | Catwalk Cats