Boe The Cat Poem by Chuck Toll

Boe the Cat was not an easy cat to like
But then he did not like others either.

Blandishments carried no weight with Boe,
He bit or scratched at all who drew close
Believing the entire house to be his domain,
He considered a carelessly unprotected ankle
anywhere as fair game for attack

There was, in truth, little endearing about him.
“The Cat from Hell” my daughter pronounced
As he rebuffed yet another of her overtures.

He was in indoor cat, and quite mad.

Boe’s one redeeming virtue I could see
Was his unqualified devotion to my wife
And the joy his exclusive adoration gave her.
He had arrived with her, a dowry of sorts,
Or an inscrutable prenuptual agreement.

To be fair, the Cat was gentle with our son.
And usually chose to sleep in our room, Still,
I found him generally surly, suspicious and
Ill tempered. “No. He’s feisty but he's family”
Insisted my wife, scooping him up in her arms

Saved from a South Boston slum before I arrived,
Boe was as tied to her as remote from the world..
Whenever we took an overnight, we would return
To hairballs or puddles (or sometimes worse)
Expressing his feelings on being abandoned.

The first person up, I aways made the coffee.
The Cat from Hell came as I prepared to put
His catfood on his mat—just in time to bite me.
Truth. Predictable, and embarrassing too-
My limbs looked scored by needle tracks!

Once, fretting about something, I awoke early
And had the dish in place before Boe arrived.
Seeing it, he just stared balefully at me, waiting.
I retrieved the food, pretended to fill the plate,
Put it down. He promptly bit me, then ate content.

Boe did have a favorite pasttime in his life:
To crouch motionless by windows staring out
At the birds flittering on feeders and squirrels
Racing across the lawn, his jaws trembling,
Instinctually knowing how nicely they’d crunch.

One day my wife returned to find Boe dead
On the kitchen floor, cause of death unclear.
Called at work, I drove home quickly to find
My wife weeping, my boy confused by his
First encounter with death, and the cat silent.

We wrapped our cat in his blanket, togther
With some toys our son wished to give him.
Twenty minutes to a clearing in a wooded grove
Filled with the chatter of birds and squirrels.
I covered the hole I dug with a good-sized stone.

In a few weeks, my little scrapes and punctures
Healed and the scabs fell away. Somehow, though,
Mornings at our house were different now, and less,
In the absence of those sharp teeth and claws,
And that strange, twisted little mind.

Every so often I take a walk to what we call
Boe’s Woods to see how our cat is sleeping.
.