pi & anne

Friends are strange, right? And they don’t always understand each other. Like the time I told her about my favourite poem and she replied that I just didn’t want to leave the cage.

The Panther.
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris.

By walking past the bars, his gaze is worn,
it cannot hold onto the threshold and beyond.
It is as if there were a thousandfold of bars
and past a thousandfold of bars no world.

The supple pace, smooth steps of strength
turning around in smallest circle’s length
is dance of force around a central port
a mighty will benumbed lingers in, a fort.

Once in a while, the pupil’s curtain slides aside
with hushed attention -. Then, a picture steers inside,
goes through tense stillness of its limbs, descends –
and ends its own existence in the heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 6.11.1902, Paris¹

A cage has a dimension, and a dimension comes with rules and finality. When you try to leave your dimension, the feet will ask, is this ground? They will ask, are we feet?

in a storm
the leaking window
talks
more to the body
than to the mind

At least 11 of the world’s 40 or so species of cat have black forms – individuals whose fur contains high levels of the pigment melanin – melanin determines how dark they are, as the more pigment an animal has the darker it is.²

At night I keep dreaming I’m going back to school or university, but I’m not younger. I am as old as I am. And I’ve already graduated. Anyway, something always happens that keeps me from actually getting there.

the sky
night after night
a clouded roof
so I turn to
fancywork

In practice, the term black panther only really applies to leopards and jaguars, as fully black individuals don’t occur in the other species. Melanistic leopards and jaguars are rare, perhaps because melanism offers better camouflage only in the densest, darkest forests.²

Change is like walking through four rooms, she said, and each room is a stage, and when you have walked through all the rooms, you have grown, you have accepted it. But I stayed in one room too long. It took me seven years. I still go back to confusion and the ‘valley of tears’. I grieve. This didn’t fit into the plan.

In many African countries black panthers are revered and considered symbols of power, darkness, death and rebirth.²

Stones that fly will hit something, inevitably.

In jaguars, the mutation is dominant hence black jaguars can produce both black and spotted cubs, but spotted jaguars only produce spotted cubs when bred together.³

Friends ARE weird. One day, she said I should remember the women being raped in India and Africa, and that they have it so much worse. They have so much more reason to be traumatised.

18+
someone cracks
pistachios

---

¹Translation by Kati Mohr

²https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/what-is-a-black-panther

³https://bigcatrescue.org/black-panthers/