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Kathy Fagan
Catch
I’d spent the morning trying
to sketch a cat, but in the dream
that night was a different cat, paw
caught in its collar. When I woke,
because I am a poet I wrote,
the cat has a poem caught in its collar.
Collar suggesting the yoke of domesticity.
Cat sharing the first syllable of my own name.
In the dream the cat was black and white—
I’m a Libra—and while the situation
was clear and my helping instinct strong,
I hesitated, having always both loved and feared
the unpredictable animal of my own nature.
I’d wanted to sketch a cat not catch it,
to capture in graphite its curves and markings
not hold its creaturely panic in my arms.
When I freed the paw, what I felt was
the poem drawn from my body by its claws.