“We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass…A duprass is a karass composed of only two persons. Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a duprass always die within a week of each other.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Today I drove by a pond
in the heart of autumn;
today I saw love
reflected with the leaves
against the water’s icy face.

A line of geese
crossing the cracked asphalt;
Zeno’s paradox
with webbed feet.

Geese mate for life, you know.

An awkward moment,
a bonded pair divided
on either side of my car;
and the yearning to come back home to one another
palpable for us all.

###

Domestic cats who outlive
the spinsters who feed them
should never be split apart.
To separate a bonded pair
is an act of unnatural cruelty;
to separate a bonded pair
is to vivisect
creatures of God.

At the end of the day
we all just want our other halves.

###

Today we fought again
over unimportant minutiae
and dishes in the sink.
A Vonnegutian duprass
at fundamental odds;
seething soul mates
somehow led astray
from their Bokononist purpose.

At the end of the day
we all just want our other halves.

###

I cry over the dishes
and wonder
if he would still feel agony
detached from me
on opposite sides of the road;
if we were geese
and there was no question
that we’d mate for life.

We are
lost in the dark
and far from home;
a bonded pair with severed tether,
a magnetic draw
trying to call us
back together.

###

A karass built for two,
but now
if I were to go
where would he be in a week?