Rodent Quartet


1.
Romex winds through a drafty
Victorian farmhouse,
Where, added a century after
Its first construction,
Honeycombs lathe walls making
A warm nest of voltage.
It twists about
Like a nervous system
In which all sorts of creatures
Might find rest.
In the hush of night, though,
Tiny clawprints unscroll
Through the layers of dust as
One black, bead eyed mouse
Cautiously but without
Hesitation takes these highways
Like an unseen finger tracing
A blueprint from dining room
To 2nd floor bedroom
Having made a perfect mirror of these
In its tiny brain.


2.
Like human brains, mice minds made
In embryo and continued in infancy
Resemble a very slow electrician wiring a home.
They assemble themselves only gradually.
Each nerve emerges
In mouse/human embryos
From a vague disturbance then a faint
Desire that, as yet, has no direction
Until bit by bit it acquires a longing
That feels the pull of the place it was made to go.

Then, in the mouse/human baby stage,
The nerves rapidly differentiate,
And, in bursts, twist outward
Like time-lapse portrayals
Of aircraft at nighttime taking off everywhere
To loop here and there about the earth.

Like those planes’ glimmering light trails
Seeking their tiny airports,
Nerves make the most intricate designs
In seeking to bridge places to places
Inside the brains and the bodies
Of both mice and children, and so
Knit together these as yet dark,
And thus unconscious, planets.

And the process, succeeding, becomes
Like an old minuet
As little nerves spiral and glide
In and around in their complexly
Interacting pattern until they
(or perhaps more precisely
A stunning majority of them)
Embed themselves somehow in their long
Preordained destinations.

And new kinds of illumination are switched
On again and again in the mouse
Along a long row that switchbacks
And switchbacks into an expanding
Chandelier of stars.

And the dance continues in silence
(at least to your ears) but its music
Swells in the crib by your bed
And through the sheetrock beside it
Where in a small sleeping heap
By the side of their mother
Quartets of paws are twisting in their sleep
To the occasional expelling of tiny sighs.


3.
It’s winter. It’s three a.m.
Humans are out for the night.
There is a sudden snap
And a great hubbub and thrashing inside the kitchen
Silverware drawer.
And the sound continues, then stops,
Then starts again, as vehement yet shorter than
The previous thrashings. Perhaps
To ears beyond ours there are
Outcries, a stunned first instinctual shriek of pain
And then wails and appeals for succor
That dwindle into despairing moaning:
Signs of no less than a life and death struggle
Carried out in panic in complete isolation.
And otherwise there’s total silence, apart from the struggle,
Save for the kitchen clock’s ticking and ticking
That measures the passage
With its indifferent and neutral precision.
 
From the first moment, all the house mice in the curtain walls
Have turned into statues, fixed in agonized tension.

And they only come of of these rigid postures
Long after the noise that froze them
Has died away.




4.
There is a mouse poised at the end of the world.
It has just caught sight of an unexplored passage,
A tunnel that is thoroughly spiderwebbed.
The mouse approaches it
Tasting fear, but excited and respectful.

Had this small rodent been born
In human form, she would have been
Doubtless a loner, a child who occasionally
Tested out interesting dangers, who loved
Difficult conundrums, who never
Went anywhere without a book in her backpack, and
Who listened at 13 to nothing but baroque music while
She studied advanced mathematics on her own.
All this she did without being particularly
Concerned about her relative non-popularity
Among her less inquisitive peers.

So this mouse now deep in the spiderweb
That hangs in the unexplored passage
Stretches out her nose to lay several
Of her small whiskers
On the threads of the old webbing
Where it, partially detached,
Drifts silently back and forth
In the almost imperceptible
Motion of air in the tunnel.

Quieting her mind, the mouse
Begins to listen, to hear through her whiskers
What to her quivering nerves feels like
A gust of wind working its way down
A great labyrinth towards her.
But listening more closely, she slowly realizes
That this wind’s filled with patterns,
With a latticework of sound that shimmers
Like light across wind-rippled water.  

And she realizes, the skin along her back
Uncannily tingling with a feeling of privilege,
That she, a mouse, is somehow listening
In an utterly alien, non-aural medium
To the work of a master
Of a whole different order.

For as she listens, she hears a song,
A song that grows painfully beautiful,
The song of an artist who spun something
Out of its different body and consciousness,
Something that was however designed
For no ears, for no audiences,
A song of longing yet longing for nothing
That mouse could remember or
Mouse-like mammal could fantasize,
Something strange, self-sufficient and simply
Left behind with no expectation
In this crystalline loneliness—
A radically divergent geometry shaped eons
Before her, but replicated and left in this passageway.

And so it is the mouse learns
A song wholly new to her species,
That retains its strangeness
Even as she painstakingly crafts
A version to sing to the ears of her kind,
In whom it will awake a longing,
Different from anything they have yet known.

Such are the dreams that we are made on.

And there is yet another category of non-pet animal—one that lives in the wild, but wants very much to live inside where it is cosy and warm—and sometimes does. These are various (the category includes snakes), but one of my favorites stayed with us for a number of seasons.

A possum.

One could easily spend hours on hours gazing into eyes like these. And indeed, slow-moving, slow-living possums are just great about returning the gaze, allowing it to go on and on for a time far longer than many other mammals achieve—even than dogs. Possums up this game to a positively Keatsian level: if you don’t spook them, you and they can feed deep, deep upon each other’s peerless eyes.

Things are, perhaps, on average, much, much more interesting when people and animals live together.

One could do worse than be the companion of animals.