And so you feel it for them?
That makes no sense. They lived lives
Of the woods, streams, grass, and scrub
Long years since. They are just cats,
A tribe of kinds, coats and size,
All that splits them, to your eyes.
They stalk, kill, and eat warm prey,
Lives not as large, for the most
Part, as they are. They will kill.
They’ll kill well. Lives you don’t want
And lives you want, they want, too.
A cat with a rare bird’s corpse
Is an old soul with a sack
Of ripe, dark plums—They taste good
To her. They taste good to her.
And then they can break your soul
When they go or die, or when
You come to think you’ve no choice
But to kill them, kill some of them,
Kill one of them, try to kill
Such beasts that don’t die so well,
That scratch and yowl, that climb trees,
That twitch and flop in the road
For hours, a burr in your core,
That purr, that try to get out
Of the house, out of the bag,
Off the vet’s desk. They do die,
But they fight it to the end.
Check all the books on the shelves
By folks who lived with cats, killed cats,
And wrote down what it felt like,
Each grim scene of death, of guilt.
To kill a cat is to kill
Or try to kill, your own self,
The part that’s all beast, the part
You most want, need to be dead,
That won’t die just to please you,
That won’t fall off of the cliff,
That leans a bit and then sits,
The lost fiend that could come back.
That part of you is the cat.
