For Amenhotep, Tiger Cat, Found Dead By The Roadside

Portrait of a Cat

The hit in the gut,
seeing your body, there,
by the road, stiff:
the grey & white fur,
the moustache mouth,
but the cat’s
gone out of you:
no arching curves,
no mid-air twists,
just angles now.
Paw stalker,
hunter of mice,
preserver of property lines,
cat of high howls,
of rumbling purrs,
gone
just this heavy weight,
this cat of stone
in my arms.

Author’s Bio:
Barbara Crooker’s books are Radiance, winner of the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature; and More (C&R Press, 2010). Her poems appear in a variety of literary journals and many anthologies, including Good Poems for Hard Times (Garrison Keillor, editor)(Viking Penguin) and the Bedford Introduction to Literature.