Catherine Edmunds

The Cat, the Snail, the Man and his Wife  

 

The cat with the eyebrows

resides in a highly desirable three/four bed house,

most pleased with itself, most ignorant of the existence

of the snail, who would be its friend, but whose slowness

precludes any such possibility.

 

The man of the house reads booklets

explaining how avocet chicks

can walk straight from hatching.

The cat doesn’t give a flying fish about any of that.

The man exists in soft meadows of memory

since his wife left him

two years ago on the stopping train to Crewe.

He shuts his eyes: he’s miles away

on a wet-windy walk from Portinscale.

 

The cat, more urban in temperament,

once carried its kits across a street, stopped the traffic.

The man never knew and the cat’s not saying.

Long time ago, the garden was filled with butter,

the kits played and leapt to catch lazy bees,

the first time ever the cat saw the first kitten’s face

it knew that to realize its dreams, it must first wake up.

Time capsized with a subtle sweetness.

 

The man’s wife smoked black cigarettes,

and the cat has to wonder if that’s the reason she left.

It’s not. The snail knows better, but the cat

doesn’t think to ask the snail.

 

The man aches for the path that leads up to Black Sails,

high in the Coniston Fells. His wife, oh his wife…

The snail wants to bring the man comfort,

to tell how a weasel invaded the whitethroat nest

and caused them to panic fledge,

but the snail lacks the words.

It slimes its way back into the garden,

contemplating the Origins of all Morality.

 

The man brews his tea as the coloured sands

stream through the hole in the timer.

Tomorrow, Eagle Crag, Borrowdale.

The cat is content and meows a gentle refrain,

but the man knows the tea smells of trains, of loneliness.

 

The snail is hunting the hole in time that isn’t there

and cannot be found; a helix of infinite dimensions.

Of such small things is its world contained.

The cat yawns, bares fangs, a deep kiss-pink throat.

The man’s wife once broke her nose on a walk,

or rather, the man broke it for her,

and knows in his heart he would do it again.

 

The cat’s tail twitches.

It walks away, alone, crosses a street, misses its kits so much.

Gets hit.

The man comes close to dying of grief.

His wife

was never into cats, or life, or hiking, or love.

The snail

would weep if it could.