Home after a month long job
I found a mouse, dead
and rotting on the living room
hard woods, the result
of being unalienated,
at last, to its own environs.
Beneath my window,
burrowed in a hollowed
out cubby beneath the sage
a nest of newborn rabbit
kits writhe and purr
like a bucket of worms,
or the snakes
in the hair of the furies.
They are cold, hungry
and orphaned to history.
Yesterday, when the squeals
began, I checked
I had my hand spade,
poised for the inevitable:
instead of cute
and inchoate, I see
the carcasses I’ll scoop
and tip into a plastic
grocery sack
before shoveling dirt
and fertilizer in
to bury and obscure
their bed forever.
On the half-dismantled
unscreened porch
I’m fixing to rebuild
and rescreen,
I plugged bullet-shaped
wads of steel wool
into entry-wounds
along the old oak joists,
gallery holes
busily tunneled
by carpenter bees now
pissed, embittered
and disbelieving.
By revealing
the hidden truth
of our relation,
I will teach them
the danger
of their fixed ideas,
what socially-
constructed nature is.