PoemsMiceSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this story1You may take my wordfor their being very nearly as hard to herdas people.Whereas the curlew may “wheep” or “wheeple”depending on the stretch of salt marshor other harshterrain from which it happens to hail,a mouse will whisper-waila single ultrasonicnote that resonates through the chthoniczones beloved of Hecate. A mouse will blithely throwdown this ultrasonic “hey for houghmagandie”to attract the doesome still take for eye candy.2With regard to the edible dormouse, glis glis,on which the Romans loved to reminiscelong after they stopped roasting him in honeyand poppy seed, finally running out of dinner moneywith the arrival of the Goths,he’s scarcely cut from the same clothas the beastie overturnedby the plowman-poet Rabbie Burns,himself subsisting on gruel and a little beef suet.Despite the capacity to intuitoutcomes we now ascribe to Mus musculus,it’s unlikely Rabbie—not much of a Latin scholar—would ever have susseda mouse flexing itself under the skin of “muscular.”3To say she has “sweetie mice between the ears”is to say she isn’t the keenest spearin the rack, your own latest lady.Situated as they are in a hot press or shadypantry and incorporating foil off Polo mints,blue-tinged lintfrom a tumble dryer, fibreglass, Styrofoam,their homesare no longer those rural slums exposed by Rabbiebut penthouses taunting the tabbywith tabbed silk, buttonhole twist—all such pelfas would befit any yarn-spinnerlike myselfwho’s also well-nigh resistant to blood thinners.4While it’s clear that Cooper drew heavily on Scottfor the plotof “The Last of the Mohicans,” the psalm-singing Gamutbeing a version, goddammit,of Wamba the fool,and Rebecca and Rowena are retooledas Cora and Alice Munro, he also drawson his own brawdexterity much as a mouse will raid our autumnalhoard with the aid of a thumbnailthat’s little more than a thumbnail sketch,that rudimentarydevelopment nonetheless allowing it to fetchan illimitability of corn past Egyptian corn sentries.5You may take my wordthat what you’ve faintly overheardfrom library or laundry room is the shutting of a visorfollowed by the tut-tutting of a steel-tipped incisoras mice enter the listsagainst any and every Ivanhoe. It’s all gristto the mills at which they tilt. Sennacherib and sahibhave withered before the steel-tipped nibsby which they take on the hellishzone beloved of Hecate with something of the relishand resolution ascribed by Conan Doyleto a blowpipe-wielding Andaman Islandertill, holy shit, they’ve stripped the soy-oilinsulation from the wiring of your Toyota Highlander.