The Boy on the Edge of Happiness

Click here to return to the publications page

Cat’s Lives

‘I’m just stepping out to get the cat in.’
She didn’t in fact return for a week
spent on the back of someone else’s motorbike.
Suspicious, I admit, if only for the reason
that I don’t have a cat — and strange how
I can always tell when she’s going;
her lights fade like a battery lamp or a dynamo
slowing at a junction. I realise now
I blunder her borders, the space I know
to be hers; and eventually she comes back to find me
in a cold bath, or in front of the tele
by the flowers that drooped a week ago.
And just in case you’re any in doubt,
I have a cat now. It comes in, it goes out.

Clara

Robert, what shall I say?
That without you the need to dress
or entertain is a little less?
That there are days
when I could find
loneliness
in mid performance?
Or now and again, forget a line
in a Largo, when I could be running
my fingers along your back:
these ivories your bones. Or that
your friend, Johannes, has moved in?
Should I say around town there’s a rumour
that his hand was slow at my shoulder?

From THE BOY ON THE EDGE OF HAPPINESS
Smith/Doorstop Books, ISBN: 1869961803
Paperback, 28 pages (31 May 1996)
Click here to buy it now!