Status and expectations for the first physics with the CMS detector at LHC

The CMS detector is ready to record the first LHC collisions, and the CMS collaboration as a whole is ready to analyze these data. The perspectives for very early analyses are discussed, both for what concerns the re-observation of known processes, useful as ``standard candles'' for detector understanding and simulation tuning, and for the few ``new physics'' searches where the high available energy will permit very soon to be competitive with the past and ongoing experiments.