Eulogy for a Mouse

I wrote “Eulogy for a Mouse” about three years ago and, in this case, the voice or speaker of the poem is that of my own and the event is real. In writing it, I had every intention of echoing a certain well-known poem by Robert Burns. If I have learned anything from the romantic poets, it is that I must rebel with them against a view of nature that is dominated by cold empiricism. It is a view that says that all matter is just “materials” as Mary Shelly put it in Frankenstein. There is nothing sacred in anything. But Romaticism sees a mysterious sacredness that is present in nature. In Coleridge, for instance, one should note that the Albatross dropped from the ancient mariner’s neck precisely on his epiphany regarding his view nature—when the slimy things of the sea were no longer just slimy things, but beautiful fellow creatures sharing with us in the experience of life itself:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I bless'd them unaware!
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I bless'd them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Being a Black Elk fan, I recall him talking about thanking the animals that were killed for providing food for him. The deer, the bison and all living things are brothers who gave up their lives to provide food for the humans who kill them. And, in a completion of the cycle, when humans die, they also gave life back by returning to the soil, which fertilizes the grass that feeds the bison and the deer. The animal and the material that he is made of are as sacred as the material of our own human composition. We are all cut and carved of the same stuff, and we are all connected, "mitak oyasin" say the Lakota: we are all related.


Eulogy for a Mouse

Overrun with vermin
and their little turds left all over the stove top,
and the holes they would bore in the bread and boxes of cereal,
I started killing them in those little traps that snap,
Hoping that it is a quick and humane death they bring.
I flushed their remains down the toilet without a ceremony
And with about as much remorse as a sociopathic killer,
until I got up early one day and startled one
on the stove coils.
With a wooden spoon in my hand,
I hit her before I really saw her.
Two quick reflexive smacks
terminated all that she was.
No more would she sniff for the bits of bacon
my son left on the table,
or nibble the dried romano cheese crumbs
my wife missed when she cleaned
off the counter from last night’s pasta dish,
nor see, with those dark beads she had for eyes,
the nocturnal visions so familiar to her
along her route behind the back of the refrigerator,
under the cabinets and in the oven.
Vanished were anything resembling thoughts she might have had
of mates, children, or those fearful shadows that pass at night when she was at her most alert.
All that was invisible to me and known only to her kind, all that she knew, sensed, took pleasure in, dissolved.
Her creamy coffee-colored carcass lying still and limber
on the stove top.
Her underside was eggshell white
and complimented the pink of her feet,
The others had been gray or brown or a vulgar color
but she was uncommon in color and form,
In a quick review of my actions
I realized that in her last moment she had looked at me,
had hesitated,
stopped,
stood on her hind legs as if to say,
you took my children
take me too.
Pure anthropomorphic projection on my part and
I should rest in the science that says mice do not think.
But I do not rest,
and I do feel guilt,
and I cannot account for why will not forget her.