Imminent Threat
Two killers have taken my garden hostage.
Wisteria coils around the fallen
barbed-wire fence. Some crazy double helix,
its tendrils circle the hickory
my grandfather planted in 1966
when Time was asking “Is God Dead?”
and my grandmother was praying for her son
to come home from Tay Ninh.
He planted the cane to harvest fishing
poles, carefully placed it, I remember
him say this past year as he took to his bed,
“50 yards away from the house
should have been plenty,”
but it grows nearly two feet each season.
Its roots deny frost. They inch toward spring,
some underground memory, a knowing
that almost touches the southern corner
of this house. I have tried to fight back,
used a machete to chop the tangled
past, but November means a stay of execution,
when it’s too cold to do anything but sit,
tense in this oversized chair and listen
to the harsh, cold wind and political
talk of “a thumpin” on CNN,
but I’m really thinking about Bob,
a half-tailed cat that I lured in from my
hostaged garden. He called it home.
These beauties kill, I said, fighting the spring
vines and stalks to place a bowl of food near,
then moving it each day, nearer and nearer
to the house, until he was on the back
steps eating from my hand. I thought I would
save him, fatten him up, but feral is feral,
and his meows were not for love or comfort:
they were for survival, for the next thin meal.
He marked his territory: terrorized
the domestic cats. First, he would bite and scratch
when I wasn’t looking, then after
I had gotten attached, wanting just one
touch of his furry back, he let me see
him chase the smaller ones deep into
that garden mess. He’d come out smiling,
“a thumpin’,” he’d say. I kept thinking,
He’s made such a mess of things. I have to
do something. So yesterday, I made a plan
to catch that little bastard and take him
for a drive to an upscale neighborhood,
maybe, with houses built from floor plans
with bonus rooms and full-size basements.
The ones middle class families can’t afford
to build. My son said, “Just take him to the pound,”
and I probably should just let them gas him,
but it is not easy to face an executioner,
to say, “This cat’s a bully, a manipulator.
There is no love in him. I made a mistake.”
I was ready to take him to some
far off place, ready for what I’d say
when the children missed him, but I guess
he sensed my intentions and I haven’t
seen him in days. So, I sit in this easy
chair and wait to hear him mew or see him
bathe in the front porch morning sunlight.
I wish that I’d acted months ago, swift
and severe, put all my force into a kick
or just shot him in the head with the .22
that I keep over the refrigerator
but I couldn’t stay the course. When I looked
into his face, I couldn’t stomach it.