When a caught mouse lay dead, for a week,
and stuck to the floor, I started setting
the traps on a few of my ex's and my old
floral salad plates. Late
one night, when I see one has sprung, I put it on the
porch, to take it to the woods in the morning, but by
morning I forget, and by noon—and by after-
noon the Blue Willow's like a charnal roof
in Persia where the bodies of the dead were put for the
scholar vultures to pick the text
of matter and the text of spirit apart.
The mouse has become a furry barrow
burrowed into by a beetle striped
in stripes of hot and stripes of cold
coal—head-first, it eats its way in
to the heart sweeter than dirt, to the mouse-bowels
saltier, beeswax and soap
stopped in the small intestinal channels.
And bugs little as seeds are seething
all over the hair, as if the rodent
were food rejoicing. And the Nicrophorous
cuts and thrusts, it rocks and rolls
its tomentose muzzle, and its wide shoulders,
in. And I know, I know, I should put
my dead marriage out on the porch
in the sun, and let who can, come
and nourish of it—change it, carry it
back to what it was assembled from,
back to the source of the light whereby it shone.