After “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst
Your feelings, he said, are feelings of a woman
with no mercy in them. They are the feelings of a woman
who would starve her husband and child because
they made chaos in her life. They are the feelings
of a woman who would kill her dog to save
money at the grocery store. They are the feelings of a woman
like one of the three Marys who washed the feet
of Jesus portrayed as a sinner, yet for what, I’m not sure.
They are the feelings of a woman who counts
dead mice to fall asleep instead of sheep, who would
cut her cuticles too close just to watch them bleed.
They are the feelings of a woman who stays up late
to peer through an open window and let pebbles
from her garden fall through her fingers, hoping
to catch the rim of a man’s fedora as he passes
taking a midnight stroll. They are the feelings
of a woman who reads Heidegger at bedtime with
no abhorrence to his penchant for Naziism, a woman
who lacks concern for any matters beyond her own existence.
They are the feelings of predators in the wild, devoid of
conscience or awareness of being, no different
than a black fly sucking remnants of a dead
mouse caught in a glue trap, alone and abandoned
in the corner of the garage, which, if it had feelings
only felt something for the scent of peanut butter
smeared over the white stickiness of fate and was
fooled by an illusion, a kind of trickery that’s cruel
yet necessary by the one ridding their life of scavengers.
Your feelings, he said…
You are, she said,
unforgiving.
That is no excuse, he said justly.