Before dawn, in a yard where even the thistles cling to their shadows, a cat asks a question nobody can answer. That is the whole scene of Dave Bonta's poem, but it opens onto something larger: desire, loneliness and prayer can sound exactly alike.
The poem is a single sentence, and its construction is part of its meaning. For the first five lines nothing happens grammatically. "In the before-dawn / stillness of the crickets, / thin sickle-moon, the thistles in the yard / inseparable from their shadows" is a list of things simply present, with no verb to move them along. The verb finally arrives with "comes," and it arrives from beneath the front porch, so the sound seems to push up out of the dark. The poem is written in free verse with no rhyme. Its music comes from texture instead: the thin, hissing sounds of "thin sickle-moon" and "thistles," and the clipped *k* of "crickets" and "sickle," which makes the quiet sound faintly like a scratch.
The thistles hint at what the poem is about. They are "inseparable from their shadows," a half-light in which everything blurs into everything else. Against that background the cat is the one thing that is not joined to anything. Its cry is a sound looking for a partner.
The cry itself gets the poem's most striking move. "Ow?" is repeated five times, each on its own line, so the words fall down the page like the ticking of the "urgent metronome" the speaker compares them to. The spelling is clever. "Ow" is the sound of pain, but the question mark turns it into a question. It also sounds like "how?" or "now?" with a letter missing, though that is my reading rather than something the poem states. The cat's yowl becomes pain, question and plea all at once. The metronome image does something odd too, because it compares a living, hungry animal to a machine for keeping time, in a poem whose title speaks of "missing hours." The cry measures time that no one else is awake to count.
Then the speaker steps in and interprets. The sound is "pure supplication / addressed to no one / in particular." The religious vocabulary lifts the cat's need to the level of prayer, and "no one in particular" makes it a prayer with no recipient, which is how many human prayers feel at four in the morning. The line breaks sharpen the effect. "Poor feral" hangs at the end of a line, tender and pitying, before "cat in heat" lands with blunt biological honesty. Sympathy and plain fact arrive one after the other, and the poem refuses to choose between them.
The final phrase is the most open: the cat is "counting the ways / in which this endless moment / might be illuminated." Attributing thought to a cat is a generous leap, and the speaker seems to know it. "Counting the ways" may faintly recall the famous line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet, "Let me count the ways," and the echo fits, since the five "Ow?"s do sound like a tally. "Illuminated" answers the thin sickle-moon, which gives so little light, and it carries a double meaning of physical light and understanding. The verb is "might," not "will," so the poem ends on a possibility. Dawn is coming, but we never see it.
Judging by the title, which presents the poem as a page from some larger book, this is a fragment of time that slipped out of ordinary life, the hour when everyone else is asleep and only creatures with urgent needs are awake. That is where the poem's significance lies. It takes a sound most people would find annoying and listens to it closely enough to hear the shape of a human experience: asking into the dark, with no guarantee that anything will answer, and still asking, again and again.