NIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD My mother kept a stockpot -- garlic cloves, bones, rinds, pearl onions and the lacy spine and eyes of a trout went into it -- When the window cleared, the garden showed beyond the lemon balm, through the steam, cats: Bucking. Rutting. All buttocks and stripes. Up on the wall and wild, they made the garden wild -- for all the gelded shrubs and the careful stemming on trellises, of a bushed-out, pastel clematis. One summer night I went out to them. I looked up. Their eyes looked back -- not the color of fields or kale -- the available greens -- but jade-cold and with a closed-in chill I was used to -- lucid as a nursery rhyme and as hard to fathom, revealed by rhythm, belied by theme, never forgotten in those nights of childhood in a roomful of breathing, under wartime sheeting. Outside, the screams and stridency of mating. -- Ms. Eavan Boland has lived at various times in Ireland, England and the USA - Teacher, writer. Her volumes of poetry include "New Territory," "The War Horse," "In Her Own Image," "Night Feed," "The Journey," "Outside History."