Poet Laura: The Consequence of Cats

Once again, it’s the dog or cat question? Ideally, my preference would be one of each, but that’s a tightrope hard to walk. Perhaps the stereotype of cats and women has some basis of truth to it, but I started my life surrounded with a dog or two. As a young girl, my grandparents had a terrier and a chihuahua, and then through my growing up years, my family had a black Pekingese in Portugal and then two pugs when we lived in Texas. As an adult, I had pugs, a cockerpoo, and I rescued a collie mix, Sasha, from the pound when my husband fell in love with her. She went well with his rattling 1952 Chevrolet pickup.

But all that changed when my oldest daughter found a scraggly orange cat near the stock tank on my girlfriend’s ranch and then, a couple years later, kids came by the house with a box of orange kittens, minus one when they left. Odd how those two orange cats changed the pattern. Tigger Two grew up with my youngest daughter, and when that daughter was in high school, we adopted McGee who traveled with us to live in Virginia and then back to Texas. I now live alone with a bossy old housecat and a feral kitty named Lily.

In late spring or summer, I’ll be doing a Poet Laura reading to the chickens, and I hope there are chickens. It was sad, today, at the grocery store to see the shelves empty of eggs because of the rampant bird flu. But what about reading to cats? Well, as I read A.A. Milne’s Pinkle Purr, my two cats stared at me for about ninety seconds with an “is there food?” look in their eyes, and then they each walked away to other places. Yes, we know who’s in control, and though cats may not be filled with poetry, poetry is full of cats. They are such a metaphor, an enigma, hold their own power, and I find T. S. Eliot the poet most intrigued by cats. His poems of cats could certainly fill a textbook of analysis, but I do love Macavity.

“Macavity’s a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed ….”

—excerpt of “Macavity” by T. S. Eliot

Macavity is the rabble-rouser from the play Cats, and Eliot modeled him after Moriarity in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Memoir of Sherlock Holmes. Eliot brought the quirks of cats to life, naming them all.

I, too, have numerous poems about cats. But what about the dogs? I do not believe I have one. Shame! My “The Holly Tree” is about McGee’s gravesite in my yard, and then there is the poem about his loss (a poem I wrote in one of Megan Wilome’s workshops):

The Reluctant Goodbye

An image stays
behind closed eyes,
like a phantom—

as if a cougar
stalking its prey—
you can’t look away.

And there’s an empty
spot in the bed,
familiar chores

and rituals
no longer vowed,
the times we’d

play in the midst
of day.
It’s that look

in your eyes
that haunts me still,
as you sat serene

on a steel table
near the vet who’d
said

“Don’t wait
too long.”
That last vision

of you sticks around,
how you’d trusted me
and I let you down—

that trusting gaze
still steals my sleep,
still makes me weep.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

Lily, photo by author

And then there’s Lily, the liberated feral with her own story:

Sleuth

She slipped into the house
             and vanished.
Strolled in on hushed paws
seeking a safe spot,
             concealed from me
as my housecat sniffed
             her essence
and mulled his defense schemes
while the feral kitten cowered
             somewhere
or not. She’s but a vapor
poised here and there,
scattering like a rainstorm
drifted toward the drought
             of a western flatland.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

In seeking out poems about cats, I came across some devastating verses I will not share, but we all know that cats, like much wildlife in general, have often been mistreated by mankind, and perhaps, that explains a cat’s reluctance—their uppity attitude. But here is an excerpt from a poem, by Pattianne Rogers—a poem I love for its pure creativity.

“And the tail of the night flicking
Through the calls of the clover and the spring
Stars slinking past the eyes of midnight
And the hour of the field mouse passing
Through the claws of stars ….”

—Excerpt from Finding the Cat in a Spring Field at Midnight by Pattianne Rogers

How vivid is this field and the night in Rogers’ poem as it becomes the cat? It reminds me how everything is threaded and connected. And Marge Piercy’s poem, “The cat’s song,” is a delight:

“Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
To face into the shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.”

—Excerpt from The cat’s song by Marge Piercy

So, in that vein of Piercy’s poem, here is my poem with its threads weaving cats and life:

A Lame Farewell

Out my side-eye, a lumped creature
lays in Texas sun beamed to the patio.
My squinted eye sees its bunny legs
stilled forever, the feral kitty

looking my way. “See the gift?”
My new knee only three days old,
stiff like the roasting rabbit,
I grip the rail of my walker

as the corpse bakes outside,
know I’m too feeble to bury
the remains, dignify its departure
as I foresee its swelling decay.

Visions of beetles, worms, perhaps
a vulture feasting beyond the pane.
Under veil of nightfall, I hobble
with walker and shovel out back,

gather a sad hare, and unable to dig
a hole, blanket him deep // beneath
shaded shrub, bid him goodbye
with apology. Envision his spirited

yesterday in a rare summer rain,
blithe in a neighbor’s unmown grass
unaware of menace. I travel a similar

road in my blurred years, at the mercy
of predators and frayed rugs—
the reaper lurking as I tend to days
of birdsong, waxwings wary of peril.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

Your Turn

How have cats (or dogs, etc.) impacted your life? Why must they leave us so soon? Write about how their personality fits into family life—how do they master you—how do they fill your heart? Or in the words of John Scalzi, an American sci-fi writer, “in a dog-eat-dog world … be a cat” (from his novel Starter Villain).

Photo by d’n’c, Creative Commons License via Flickr. Post by Sandra Fox Murphy.

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Sandra Fox Murphy

Sandra grew up everywhere as a USAF dependent, rootless, and when exposed to the beatnik poets at Indian Valley College, was smitten with poetry. After retirement from the U.S. Geological Survey, she found herself immersed in storytelling, and ensconced in Texas, researches small-town history and is the author of six novels, including Let the Little Birds Sing, the beginning of the Fidelia McCord Trilogy inspired by a young girl who came to Texas in 1847. Aging Without Grace is her first poetry collection, and her poems have been published at the Ocotillo Review, The Write Launch, Humans of the World, The River, and in several anthologies. Sandra's muses are the environment, history, and the natural beauty and mystery of place.

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