Category: Mammals

Sick in Bed With the Cats

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

i.
Like ragpickers they keep the cut sleeves
of men who have loved them:
the sleeves of prayer robes,
coarse jute,
French cuffed gingham,
drooled on gabardine.
They are not trophies, these bits of cloth,
they are bedding.

ii.
I am pinned sick like a swallowtail
by treacle-colored cats,
one at the head,
the other through my belly.

Liam kneads my stomach
the way a crust-eyed baker works dough,
expressing the memory of milk,
memory of sun in night sweat,
four o’clock black silk.

He tucks his head in my armpit
for the pheromones.
Our cycles synchronize.
I take to sleeping through the day.
If I could, I’d curl in the old rocker,
chafing in the winter sun.

iii.
To make a ginger tabby poultice
you will need fresh ginger root,
a cotton bag, a wooden spoon.
Place grated root in bag,
boil in a liter of water,
throw out the stinking thing and instead,
apply cat directly to the head.

iv.
That old lie about cats
sucking the breath from babies —
they only do that
if there is not someone older
or more innocent.

v.
I become a cat head god,
rubbed raw,
red as a strawberry,
my seeds on the outside,
my wounds plastered with honeycomb hung
under the browning yellow of the light.
I find a cave, a closet they have all forgot
at the back of the Salvation Army shop
and make my bed in pea coats
smelling of the alley piss and three-day pass,
jackets of kids shot young
for wearing boots and hoods,
blouses shucked by lovers in the park,
and find a cave and rest,
healed, whole, waiting
for some unspoken good.

Burrow Poem

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

They say the ermine will kill
even when it isn’t hungry,
slipping through dry corn
like a wisp, a flicker of light
from a passing car, and then quick
at the back of the neck.
The local mastiffs stay in the barn.

And they say the ermine makes its home
sometimes in the den of its prey,
jealous of the memory
of the poor beast’s comfort,
decorating the place
with the skin and fur
of its targets.

But it may be misunderstood.
It’s in a state of perpetual
metamorphosis, after all,
and over the years my words, too,
have changed color in the snow,
marked by cinders from railyard fires.
They’ve also rubbed their teeth sharp,
but against the strop of better writers.
So now I send them out in the dark.

When they don’t come back
I imagine them warm
in the burrows of skulls,
shuffling insomniac
to the mouth of the den,
the arctic night
dressing itself in silk,
hiding the moon for camouflage.

Purr

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

i.
Voyager 1,
when it was launched in 1977,
carried on board a golden record
with the music of Mozart and Chuck Berry
and greetings to alien life
in fifty-five languages:

“Hello from the children of planet Earth,”
it said in English.
“May the honors of the morning
be upon your heads,”
it said in Turkish.

It’s difficult to beat,
“How are you all? Have you eaten yet?”
but my favorite is in Swedish:
“Greetings from a computer programmer
in the little university town of Ithaca,”
it says.

ii.
No one knows exactly why cats purr.
We assume they are happy,
comfortable, comforted, safe,
but vets report they also purr
at the moment of death,
after the needle is slipped under the skin
into the vein of the leg.

And studies show they purr
at a frequency that heals bone,
that a healthy cat will lie down
next to a sick one
and begin purring for it.

But they don’t purr when they are born,
and they’re born blind and deaf,
ears down, like lumps of damp dough,
spinning through space
in their own quiet world,
huddled up against that soft universe
of fur and flesh,
huddled against the mother
they can only feel
in their blindness,
in the deep mute well of the night,
eyes lidded,
eyes wrapped in skin and loss,
until three weeks or so along:

purr.

The root and meaning of all speech,
their own golden record:
It’s me.
I’m here.

Deer Aspect

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

We slept in the thicket as we do,
half sleeping,
our thoughts walking on spring ice
branch to branch, as they do,
hearing up from the damp night of the earth
the etching into leaf of the smallest spider:
the orb weaver
the grass spider spinning, spinning
in the filtered light.

And feeling under the coarse hair of our bodies,
under the needles of our skin,
the seismic shifting of the rock,
the dry rock, the rock on fire,
far, far down —
our kin.

We wake fat some mornings, butter fat,
with our lips in leaf,
but some days inexplicably
I wake with muscled skin and hollow hair,
leaving the depression in the sumac
where our bodies have carved
hollows in the thicket, remembering
(the way we remember all fading dreams)
that I dreamed I was pale and almost hairless
with two straight and awkward legs,
coming and going through the copse
without asking and without permission,
closing the door of the great unnecessary house
in the morning, leaving,
and pocketing the keys.

Cow and Calf

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

For the third time in three years,
walking in the wilderness,
I surprise two moose,
a cow and a calf.

The cow complains, moves on
with a bovine grunt
calling the little one.

Her hair is edged with black,
the brown on her flanks so deep
you could drown in it.
She’s as tall as a draft horse and fast:
if she wanted to,
she could cover the ground between us
before I could stand up.

So I sit,
feeling a pinprick of guilt
for having intruded /

and yet,
how can I take my place in the wild,
how can I be — what’s the phrase? —
a good animal,
without lightly disturbing it?
Nothing here wants me passive:
the forgotten relation come home
to mope and grieve,
the one who sits at the edge of the fire,
the one no one speaks to,
not the sky
not the rock
not the water and the water hemlock,
and not the bat-faced calf
his eyes fixed on mine
reluctant to leave.

Fawn

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

The turkey vultures were out
on the roof of the old stables
at the bottom of the neighbor’s lot;
another on the split rail fence,
another half dozen circling high above.
The magpies that had been nesting
in the ponderosa across the way
and chasing off redtail hawks
also made a fuss, bouncing and squawking,
diving into the dry grass:
mid-July in the high plains and hot.

I came within four feet of the fawn,
enough to walk into the shade
of the vultures’ wings and their deep pink heads.
He was mostly intact:
a big gash on a haunch,
belly open,
spots still running along his side
like a promise of sunlight.

They stay with their mother the first summer
and we had seen them
working their way down the hill,
stopping at the sumac and the peach,
the doe always wary,
the fawns in the great dome of her gaze.

The day of the vultures,
she appeared and lay under the apple tree,
her udder full, ribs showing,
head heaving rhythmically every breath,
and she came back for three days
eating apples and drinking from the bird bath.
Getting back her strength.

The magpies also flew over from the stables
where they were eating her fawn,
and drank and splashed
in the bitter heat.

Deer on the Deck

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

I was having coffee outside on the second floor,
remembering how the handyman had said
when you have a wooden deck in Colorado
you’ll be replacing that two by six fir
every couple years — they get
so twisted by the summer sun.

And because he was right,
when the doe walked out on the deck below,
between inch-wide cracks,
I could make out every hair of her forehead,
cocked and furrowed like she felt
something slightly odd
but seeing nothing, shifted, cleaned,
each pegleg step sounding up
as though through the boards of a ship.

She was pregnant
and the wood below was cool
so I watched her for close to half an hour
with a swelling sense — not of love exactly
but unfathomable care
racing out like water dropped from a height
in every direction above her head.

And it occurred to me
that this must be how gods are created:
the creature below, unsettled,
with its secrets,
with its exquisite womb,
and the accidental hunter above,
in agony, close enough to touch,
too far to know.

Skunk, Twilight

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

I remember,
when I see the animal wobbling, distracted,
across the road
that the famous blacks of Velázquez
— the rich black even Picasso envied —
were burnt wood or bone,
plant or animal color,
and not an absence at all,
nothing to do with dusk
or the fading light /

likewise in his dithering,
following a scent trail
to the edge of the cornfield,
he is disconnected
from what is left of the day:
splendid, bold, apart.

And then the hay on each side
freshly mown, the draft horses
in the far stables
apparently alone;
the stag, in its own hour,
a little farther on.

I remember how much beauty
is in these margins,
in back lane illuminations,
our drifting bodies
without the purpose
and accomplishment of daylight,

how I would rather be the first painter
of common things, as Velázquez said,
than the second painter of something much grander,
rather spend the evening
with these rich relations
than back among the waking poor.

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