One late spring day you might look out
and see the taut-eyed cat pass smooth and clinical
as light along a blade, watch her taper off through grass,
suspending joints for surge and halt.
Cloistered in willow, she'll pin a bird to earth
where it flounders like a drowner,
a wing unhinging, a slackening beak,
all angles growing less acute.
You hear the flies arrive like movie-goers,
whispering blue murder,
probing fluted armpits, the drawn blind of eye.
They fizz and pivot on any place that leaks.
All night beneath the bed she coughs. You think
the birds and skinks are dispensing with intent
a measure of rough justice. You imagine lungworm
caverneers chipping her away from the inside.
Sometimes, near dawn, the roaring forties
have the house rattled, amplifying dark,
heaving cloud, tossing matter over mind.
A huntsman grows from dust and leaves its corner.
It hugs – how tight – the wall above your head.
Hazing the window with clots of breath,
you make out by the washing line
two more birds brought down (poor things)
or foreign shadows lurking under wind.
How candid morning seems, running in open-armed
like a child. Bees puzzle in mallow weed.
Blackbirds rehearse impossible chromatics,
break off to measure up the lawn.
Go out the back and look again. Tell yourself
there's nothing more than earthspin here.
Unmeaning light. The fact of still air.
And just a pair of school-socks come adrift.