Bobcat

Bobcat

In summer, my husband saw a mother bobcat
trit-trot across the bridge up the road,
trailing three cubs.
Like me, I thought.

He’d warned the men working there,
orange-vested and steel-toed, to be wary.
Warned, too, the neighbors –
leash your dogs, coop your chickens, mind your backyard children.
The worry was what she might do, this mother,
what she might destroy.
Like me, I thought.

Today, out walking in a different season,
she lay, perfectly – improbably – immobile,
her body a parenthesis at the end of that same bridge,
too muscled, too unmarred
for real death.

Her inkspill mouth, still damp,
the tufted ear, sunlit, just so –
no gore, no wound, nothing leaking.
But for a scatter of gravel in whiskers
and the emerald twitter of flies,
I wouldn’t have believed it.

I scooped leaves gone sharp-veined and brittle,
the last sprays of goldenrod and aster,
one lingering cornflower the color of sky,
and covered, at least, her body –

A small dignity,
mother to mother.

Allison Collins is editor of Upstate Life Magazine and a writer with The Daily Star and Kaatskill Life Magazine. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals. A mother of three, she lives in upstate New York with her family.