Eulogy
They do not look at you – not really.
You know their eyes won’t stop
for signs of skin and bone
and we are lost.
We love that soft skin mystery:
the purring alien and the delicate stranger within
We do not question that they live forever.
Their paws of baby skin and razor-blades
tell us they will live forever.
But they do not – and even cats must die.
Bring out your dead: Puss died.
Puss is not in Heaven or in hell.
Eternity is such a boring concept:
such an insult to the moments that we left behind -
but Puss is dead.
Claws and fluorescent eyes are always now -
a raised and fiercely furry back,
like an electric storm:
momentous and forbidden -
and so pleasing now.
Like hurricanes and dreams,
taste and memory,
foresight and convictions:
cats must die.
(Your fur is my lining;
your breath is my worth.
Your casual cruelty is my surrender -
make me remember your dictionary of greed,
your sensual surrender to your needs.
I loved you and I love you still.)
At times I wished that I could live by feline greed
and feline need, by feline creed.
At times I did forget that nothing last forever.
Cats don’t like to die a winter death.
They’d rather set their teeth in an unsuspecting Valkyrie,
carrying the heroes to that heathen paradise cats know so well.
Cats must die – but most of all they live:
a winter morning, blinding white outside
and peeping through the curtains,
Puss will take you through a curfew
of heavy blankets, burning logs and Dickens.
Puss has literary tastes.
Lazy tongue and fur and cleaning;
dreaming – and then suddenly:
her Scylla and Charybdis eyes.
So many memories, but Puss is dead.
No stone, no flowers: Puss is dead.
No stone, no flowers: death.
I remember the kitten and the feeble claws.
I remember the cat,
who cushioned mountains in her paws.
(But most of all: I loved you.
Puss, I loved you.
Most of all I loved you and you died on me.
No fair, you died on me.)