Catch by Kathy Fagan

I hesitated, having always both loved and feared the unpredictable animal of my own nature.

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Catch

by Kathy Fagan

I’d spent the morning trying
to sketch a cat, but in the dream
that night was a different cat, paw
caught in its collar. When I woke,
because I am a poet I wrote, 
the cat has a poem caught in its collar.
Collar suggesting the yoke of domesticity.
Cat sharing the first syllable of my own name.
In the dream the cat was black and white—
I’m a Libra—and while the situation
was clear and my helping instinct strong,
I hesitated, having always both loved and feared
the unpredictable animal of my own nature.
I’d wanted to sketch a cat not catch it,
to capture in graphite its curves and markings
not hold its creaturely panic in my arms.
When I freed the paw, what I felt was
the poem drawn from my body by its claws.

Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Kathy Fagan, wherein she discusses measuring time in emotional experiences, the inevitability and unlikelihood of becoming a poet, and the merits of non-intervention when composing poems. About this last part, she says:

Associations and discoveries are so much more likely to happen when the writer steps out of the way.