28th August 2020
This time of year, she has an Apple Cat –
Meaning that he, Auden, has learnt, over the years,
That come mid August
(For him, when days start smelling of barley harvested)
She will, every morning after breakfast,
Dew-proof her not-so-young-now feet with stumpy boots,
Don her many-pocketed pruning jacket,
Arm-loop a sack-softened bucket,
Step out,
And commence her minesweep navigation of all the fruit trees.
Puss happily comes along,
Content because he’s sure she regularly mows the grass
So he shouldn’t overwet his paws –
Which is cobblers, of course: she just wants to find every ruddy apple!
Mind you, what point he cannot tell in such sweet things:
Within their furless shiny skins, no trace of meat!
He, rightly, knows she values his company –
Not commuterly repetitive, but sometimes Siamese-talkative,
Or maybe tree-leoparding everywhere on days of frisky breeze.
He understands that she talks to herself through him:
Wisely with regular hiss-meows, he concurs with all she says –
Sometimes being rewarded with a jolly good head-scratch
While she quietly purrs, ‘I knew you’d agree!’
An Apple Cat now of such experience,
He’s mapped the ripening order of the trees
And flagged, in his own way,
Which fruits she’ll eat straight from picking
And those she must cut to put in pots
Atop his silent Big Hot Friend, the red iron cooker.
He has wisely mind-marked those Vindictive Trees, too,
Which grow apples large enough to give an innocent cat
A wicked bonk upon his moggy bonce,
When released like treacherous bombs
Without a fraction’s warning.
Aha! This writer must correct themselves –
There is one sort of apple
That Auden more than tolerates:
The small, the hard, and the rounder the better
Which she thoughtfully de-stalks for him
So that, in rainy spells, he can manically
Pinball-football it round the cork-tiled kitchen floor
Until it bazookas
Under the big white hummingthing which is inside cold…
And then, no matter how loud his yowls,
She won’t bloodyhell kneel down to hockeystick hook it out again
Until she’s finished covering all of one of those
Very white so thin rustly things
With her rows of special sooty scratches.
Yes: from mid August on, an Apple Cat by day –
And twice, too;
For the two thorough round the garden again after supper,
Before their evenings in the house’s snuggest room…
… Then, come her bedtime, after he has snoozed the peace away
Whilst she has peered her scrapeturn wood flavoured things
Or made oily-smelling coloured shapes on boards,
Listening to voices or good noises from the silvery box,
It is out to the shed for him, where he has a curlable bed,
There to be a different sort of Apple Cat…
An Apple Cat who only naps the night-time through
With half an ear, at least, kept constantly acock;
Thus if he hears the faintest stirring,
Far quieter than even his most hushed of purrings,
Up he silent stands, fourteen lethal pounds of semi-intellectual tabby,
While tuning ears
And Morseing commands down both faithful forepaws: “Standby, claws!”
And, steeling, like Holmes, he, noiselessly to himself –
The game’s afoot!
© Christopher Jessop 2020
