Untitled ("There is not alot of sun down here")

A short, severe poem about darkness, blame, and failed promises, ending on a half-starved creature.

A seven-line poem of scarcity that opens 'There is not alot of sun down here' and wonders 'how many crosses / it will take to not blind us anymore'. It states a hard social law - 'There is always a scapegoat / when you promise things' - and ends on a single image of neglect: 'you are not even feeding / the muskrat anylonger'.

The poem turns on a strange double-bind of light: there is too little sun, yet the crosses are imagined as a blinding excess, so faith and deprivation both leave you unable to see clearly. 'Down here' is geographic and social at once - a valley, a low place, the bottom of something - where light is rationed. The middle line names a rural economy of blame: promises always produce 'a scapegoat', someone left holding the failure. The ending grounds all of this abstraction in one withheld kindness - the muskrat no longer fed - so betrayal is measured not in grand terms but in a small creature that used to be cared for and now is not. That recurring muskrat, which appears across these poems as a barometer of the household's tending, makes the poem's bleakness intimate and literal.