Vows
I’ve been cradling the heavy cat in the half-dark
For an hour
She likes how I make her feel
And I like her—
I was mean to the dog
And now he’s dead
Well, not mean
Cold in moments
He could have used the warmth
I could tell and still did nothing about it
And so here I am
Paying—
Which I am accustomed to
And anyhow I am happy
To pay for such horrors, such ill manners
Of my character
Even if I do blame you for it—
How can I empathize with anything
When I can’t remember empathy
And you are the only mountain
For miles all around
I’ve had to learn to be kind again
To uncoil my tendrils into the light
Sometimes I pretend you are not a person
But a stone (how could I love
people again, if I didn’t?)
And I warn them: Little Ones,
Don’t learn from stones
They are too still
They are too sharp
Sometimes in the moonlight
They whisper terrible things
Copyright © 2021 by E. C. Belli. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This began as a reflection on the uglier parts that we bring to an intimate bond. I developed an interest in these slow, foul, crystalizing stances that are resentment, bile, blame, withholding and so on, and wanted to sit with them for a while in a poem, and see where it would go.”
—E. C. Belli
E. C. Belli
E.C. Belli is the author of Objects of Hunger (SIU Press, 2019). A bilingual poet, her latest book, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep (Anhinga Press, 2022), won the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry.