PIHW 2 Monday in Holy Week - Prohibition

I am a dog person.  I do not own a dog, but still, I am a dog person.  Yellow, Labrador, Bitch, to be precise.  I may not own a dog, but I know the dog that I do not own.  I am not a cat person.  Emphatically not.

     Cats have a different sense of proprietorship to dogs, and if you are used to the loyalty of a dog (even Labs. can be loyal if there is chocolate involved) then the disdainful independence of cats is unsettling.

     There are too many cats in our area, and the one from the house on the corner of the lane is insultingly ‘at home’ wherever he is.

     This morning was the first time that I had been more than a couple of hundred yards from the house during the draconian lockdown that Catalonia has imposed on us.  I went shopping in Lidl.  I don’t know what I expected the experience to be, but it was boringly, exhaustingly mundane.  Yes, I was wearing plastic gloves and wearing a face mask and people were painstakingly keeping their distance, but the sun was shining, and I was shopping.  End of.

     On the way back home, I made a small detour to return via the sea.  I was the only civilian car on the road by the beach, ahead of me was a patrolling police car.  There was a more direct route home from Lidl and technically you could say that I was bending the rules to take in a view of the sea.  If I had stopped the car and started walking on the paseo, I might well have been questioned by the police and perhaps been given a warning.  Fines for non-adherence to the rules of lockdown can be substantial.

     The memory of the police ‘outriders’ on my return home, linked to a sighting of the cat in our garden was the starting point for this poem: the car can (and does) what the hell he likes, and I have to obey the rules and stay where I am.

     The cat in question looks slightly disreputable, the sort of animal you would not like to meet alone on a dark night, it looks more than capable of looking after itself.

     The title gives the theme of the poem and the first line indicates that the title only refers to non-cat people!

     The endings of the stanzas is a deliberate attempt to make the poem have a sense of uneasiness that matches the sense that we all feel during these unparalleled days of unease.

     I wonder if the cat is bemused at the number of humans just staying in their homes, the disruption of normal routines – or has the cat deigned to notice anything out of the ordinary at all?

    

 

PIHW  2      Monday in Holy Week

 

Prohibition

Bloody cat.

Docked tail and colour

that grey-smokiness

that’s almost Siamese

but isn’t, harking back

to some rough feral

tom cat rumble

godalone knows,

umpteen, catty lives ago

when

Our fences are not

‘neighborly’ but full of

gaps, Triumphant Arches

for wide-ranging cats

who

I’ve seen this one,

tight-curled in stolen warmth,

lie on our artificial turf,

luxuriant in ownership,

while

And if it is disturbed

(I never let them lie)

it rises without haste

and drains away through

porous border spaces

where

It’s moving south,

that smear of cloud,

towards the open sea

and

Front and back and

at the sides,

in gardens, streets

on gates and walls,

in sight and out of sight

it walks and sits and creeps

and looks at

whom

The sea is at the bottom

of my street, but

I have not walked down

for week on week.

This morning I was in the car,

drove back along the beach-side road.

Police in front, I did not park

to step on sand and see the sea.

I drove directly home.

I stepped only in my demesne,

not in the paw marks of that bloody cat

which