Memaw once saw it move low 

near the gray-beat barn 
and it’s newer, tan door:
just a mean barn cat. 
She split bologna into a chipped saucer 
by the hay bales. 
Come on now, mean thing, she’d call,
her voice frayed over the yard,
like when she’d holler to my papaw.
The yellow eyes watched,
wild and gold-coined,
not the mousing kind. 
That bobcat ate ghost-quick, 
then vanished in the beam’s old wood,
a wildness.
 
I didn’t know about mistaken bodies,
then. Hers and mine,
of this ache and certain surplus,
a landscape doctors mapped 
with like comorbidity.
 
Now, the wildcat’s long gone 
from the barn. Memaw, too,
in a nicer room 
where she thinks is her home,
helping the nurses. Always caregiving.
Her mind a creekbed I cannot delve. 
 
In that place, the barn door’s gray. The wild
is fed. We sit together underneath the carport,
tethered by the ghost of bologna grease.