Scully

Our cat, Scully, lived an amazing twenty three years, and a year ago I had to have her put to sleep, and then bring her home. And she really did simply seem to be asleep. I cleared a piece of the garden where I buried her and then planted it out.

I wrote a poem for her, too. Not straight away. You have to wait for them to be written, and so it was February this year in St Ives following a writing prompt from Kim Moore before it got written.

Cat

(for Scully.1992-2015)

 

You have gone from slow. There was a shift in things

as though the air was panes of glass that slid and puzzled

and then there was the still

of nothing at all and weightlessness

listening to small stones scrape  on the steel of a spade

 

You remember how cold,  and how the weight of the ground

sank around you, how it settled,

how you fit, like an egg, or an ammonite.

 

Months now you have leached and leached.

Hair lasts beyond flesh, beyond muscle.

There are things here

that go about their patient business

unpicking, worming through

appointed places. You settle for that.

 

It will take time, you understand,

to be perfect bone, fossil-neat,

curled and comfortable,

each vertebra exactly so.

There is only one way for a cat.

 

This summer….this not-much-of-a-summer…… I got round to finishing the job off. It’ll be a good place where we can sit and remember what company she was.