It's cool and rainy today. Students are streaming onto campus, moving in... Here's a poem from a notebook I've been carrying since mid-May. Draft #15 I think.
Double Negative
Until then everything we knew about it
had to do with rabbits;
bunnies to be precise---
Our father's hands plunged
into a blue pail filled with water
as he crouched in the space
beneath the porch.
We hid to watch.
Curious.
She was busy with a baby
while he dispatched the newborns
orphaned by our cat.
So much of this is human-
made, the cat domesticated
but not, the man a few years out
of the caves of Tarawa, silent,
now our father taking those little lives
because death comes one way
or another; sooner or slower;
harder.
Her suicide became the cat;
the shock of her dead body water
in a pail. So he turned his back to us and began
his own drowning while we watched,
knowing it would not not happen.
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