(naturally)
has been hanging
around our garage
late at night sucking straight tones
from its evil throat, toning long
noise in the concrete sound-shell
attached to our kitchen.

We don't feed it,
but it keeps hanging
around as if we had.

Our neighbors must hate it.

Regrets can yowl evilly,
cats ringing in the teeth,
loose in the stomach-pit.

I think of birds sometimes.

A chickadee flew to sit
on a post supporting a fine grapevine
in our back yard today.
I'd forgotten (I knew instantly)
how entire a chickadee is.

It exclaimed itself, a point
on a rotting grapevine post
(attached by clothesline, skillfully tied,
to two other posts, the bird
unimpressed by vine or line).

I shot a chickadee once, with a friend,
Robert, on my first hunting trip.
We'd found nothing with our .22
long-rifle Remington bullets,
swift-thinking as Boys Life.
I forget which of us fired,
but Robert stepped on its head
because it was not dead
until the step and twisted sole.

I thought then
that the earth was part of the squashing,
that the woods gritted up
against the soft-blacked head,
against Robert's boot
though he seemed not to mind, soft-
hearted though he was at other times
(soft-spoken but opinionated).

Now whole, a housebuyer,
I would not thus crush a chickadee's head,

.........................but the cat
yowling for itself and my neighbors,
amplified beyond throat-pipes,
but not roaring, not mounting like a lion
to transcendent utterance,
nor making Gregorian echoes
wash through my slick concrete chamber,

sinus-like and pained,
the cat a headache banging
from the pit, making me sick with pressure
vomit can't relieve,
a cat with no bird to catch,
no garbage left unturned,
no way to be home here,
though our garage is a carport
whose door is always open . . .