The Conscience of Little Kings

The Conscience of Little Kings

When the cats have had enough
of slinking wide-eyed and soldier-like
through the garage, they fling their bodies
against the door, filling the kitchen with
furry thuds and muffled thumps which
become lost in the din of electric buzzing
and the racket of running water.

Both categorically black,
one is comprised of spare parts,
with knock knees and a shaggy flatness
which calls the probing hand
to feel for a spine, or safety pins and loose threads.
He sneers, does this cat, and he studies,
and in all of it is he is startlingly human,
calm and calculating, a mind reader who knows
when I’m reaching for a can of tuna.
Little Napolean with milk saucer eyes,
he shines red in the sun and
scratches the couch to spite me.

The other, is a ball of lead in a fur coat,
a green-eyed mass of muscle and nerves,
who shakes the walls when he leaps and lands.
A simple, oafish melon of a cat,
he loves us with his tender, blinking eyes
and the nudge of his face as we lie reading.
His token of adoration is a line of sloppy, wet sap
on our naked arms, like the slime trail of a slug
on a leaf of lettuce, and we hide our repulsion,
because he seems so proud to share.
The white tuft on his chest marks
the site of his greatest feature.

Most often, I open that door to toss
the unread newspapers, rinsed bottles and
freshly peeled cans, discovering the
worried felines, looking as though they thought
they’d been banished forever, left to gather dust
with the tools that never move.

Today, an open door cast a searchlight on the pair
who looked up from the middle of the place,
jolted and black-eyed, before moving toward
the doorway, their heads low, their cold paws
creeping along the grey, cement floor.
There was a geminate shame
in these two awkward lions;
a shared secret, an furtive oath,
an unspoken complicity was in
every agile movement.

We looked then, intrigued by the mystery,
until we saw it in the middle of the room,
between the bags of dead leaves
and the lawnmower wrapped in its
own cord: a tiny corpse, lying cold.

Looking slicked and buttered with worship,
the tiny creature glistened in its lifelessness,
the prey of emphatic attention,
and unyielding curiosity.
In the absence of blood and any other
hint of feral savagery, we wondered:
was this a kill for nature, or was it
the outcome of kittenish wonder
about the feel of softer things?

They knew,
when the hand twisted the doorknob,
when the darkness was split by the light,
when all struggle in the little body had been siphoned,
that they had done a deed.