Each of them has been a god many times:
cat, hedgehog and — our summer interloper — the tortoise.
A perfect triangle, they can neither marry
nor eat one another.
And tonight they are gods
who have made us laugh
under the jasmine under the stars.

Already, the hedgehog has stolen the cat’s supper
and, nonplussed, she has walked beside him
rushing headlong into the bushes.
Wisely now, she keeps an eye on him
and on the tortoise,
noisily criss-crossing the gravel.

For the cat, jasmine is white but the stars have colours.
For the hedgehog, there are no stars
only a sky of jasmine
against which he sniffs something dark,
outlined like a bird of prey.

Wisely, the tortoise ignores both jasmine and stars.
It is enough, she says, to carry the sky on your back,
a sky that is solid, mathematical, and delicately coloured,
on which someone too
has painted our neighbours’ address.
Come September, we will post her through the letterbox.

MAURICE RIORDAN’s collections are A Word from the Loki (Faber, 1995), and Floods (Faber, 2000). He has edited with Jon Turney A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems About Science (Faber, 2000).

©Copyright of this poem remains with the poet: please do not download or republish without permission.

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