Nancy Meneely

Dad Shot the Cat

The night before he killed himself,
I called from school to say hello. We reached
the end of nothing much to say
and I declared I loved him. “Okay,” he said.
I said he had to tell me that he loved me, too.
“Okay,” he said. “I love you.”
The note they found
beside the bottle empty of his pills
held one short line for each of us,
no mention of his love.

 

But there were times when fatherhood
eclipsed the memory of war.
He left the ones he couldn’t save behind
and tended to our injuries and ills.
He taught us three-part harmony,
how to skate on the pond he’d cleared
in the lower wood, maneuver around
the roots that jutted from the ice,
how to cherish the meager wealth
of flower and tree on his quarried farm.
One night after someone invaded
our empty house, cleaned the meat
from last night's chicken bones
and left them in the kittens’ bowl,
he gathered his girls to teach us the rifle,
loaded and ready to hand
beneath the coats on the closet floor.
We knew all this as love.

 

And, oh, he loved his birds. His reading chair
looked out onto the patio he’d built
into a sheltered place. There he erected
feeders filled each day with seed and suet
for his flock—titmice, black-capped chickadees,
a red-winged blackbird on a lucky day
and always doves and cardinals trespassing
what the others spilled. Weekend days
he'd watch for hours.

 

He’d rescued Snowball, cat as black as coal,
now family as much as we.
Snowball slept around
but always sat with Dad
the evenings when his patients didn’t call.
Snowball prowled the barn, his job
to keep it clear of mice and snakes
that nested in the stalls.
One Sunday, though, he caught
a cardinal. My father saw
the disarray of red and feathers in his mouth.

 

The war reached up behind the veteran,
caught him by the throat.
Breathless with unbidden memory,
horror overpowering pause,
he drew the gun from underneath our boots
and shot.

 

He dropped the rifle to the floor
and then himself,
howled his disbelief. “How could I have?”
he sobbed. “How could I have?”

 

And finally, now grown twice as old as he,

I notice where he isn’t in my memory
and yield to something
pressed beneath my cherishing.
I ask him, too, “How could you have?”
The answer, if there is one, is the same.

 

Ars Poetica

I’m suffering the onset of a poem.

My breathing’s not quite right.

I feel my ribs contract around

the thrill expanding in my lungs

and now inside my head

where air should be

a swimming is. I ply my strokes

against the sudden swells but I am

tentative, free verse no proof

against the rhythm of the waves,

my language flailing

in the sussurating sibilance

of sea and soughing surf.

 

And rips are metaphors

so tempting they could carry me

unwary out beyond my depth.

 

I’m overmatched. This poem

is bound to make itself.

 

It wants to signify the pictures

of my father out on Nauset Beach,

our child-length bamboo poles,

the kind of line my father

always set exactly right

for casting out and reeling in,

the way he taught us signals

in the slack and taut

and how they mean. He taught me

reach and capture and the rule

to cup the ones too young

in puddled hands and give them back

into the giving sea.