To a Dead Mouse
I
Friend, whatever brought your life to end
had no appetite for mouse flesh, nudged your
small gray body on its side with a thorough sniff
and left your corpse exposed on the asphalt path,
then, for reasons of its own, wandered off
for something better suited to its tastes,
and more substantial to its hunger.
Flies hover over you like tiny iridescent vultures
and ants engage in a reconnaissance
over the big gray hill that rose up during
the night from the asphalt when yesterday
it had been a flat surface.
Your demise, friend, is only a beginning.
Nature is very resourceful and expedient.
In a day or two, magnots will rise within you
and inflate your small frame to twice its size,
scour you until you’re reduce to a dried out
flat gray rug with tail, unless another’s hunger
first makes you its meal.
As mice go, your reputation did not exceed
that brotherhood of dreaded outcasts
humans can barely mention and not shudder –
rats, snakes, bats, and spiders.
II
Decency compels me to inform you
that you will be given no formal burial.
That honor – or vanity, depending on your viewpoint –
humans reserve solely for themselves; no eulogy,
no flowers, not even a headstone to verify
you lived and died – all of which even the vilest
of our kind receive, as though a residue
of worthiness remained in them. You will pardon
our vanity and irrationality. Death does not
change any life, only seals and ends it.
It is the one event humans cannot explain
satisfactorily. And yet death is as common as weather,
no day is without the dark cloud of its knowledge
or presence. It exceeds, possibly, all human fears,
real or imaginery, and it plays cruel sport
with the imagination, all of which, little mouse,
you have been spared.
III
Few spectacles can match its elaborate rituals
and ceremonies, not to mention its afterlife beliefs
and scenarios, centuries old, stale, and reeking
with the smell of desperation and hopelessness,
or its lofty, eloquent but empty pronouncements
and unreasoned speculations, all devised to camouflage,
deny, and ultimately transform death’s otherwise
simple and natural reality, which is nothing more
than the absence of life.
No, little friend, none of this will attend
or insult your demise. Let it suffice that you
are no more, as we also one day will be.
Earth has decreed it so.
IV
Difficult as it is to say, neither I nor anyone
can offer you hope beyond the sleep that now
enfolds you like a hawk’s talons its prey.
You have been ousted from the house of life,
the doors are locked, the windows bordered-up.
You are barred forever from reentering.
No redemptive price has been paid for you,
though you are not unworthy, and why not
I am at a loss to explain. No creed, no act of faith
was demanded of you.
And yet, far more than humans, you were
faithful to the laws imposed on you, though no
reward or better life was held out to you.
You lived the only life you knew and you
lived it well, without questioning, without
complaint, without bitterness. I tell you, friend,
there is no greater achievement.
V
The dead exist only in the minds of the living.
They, not the dead, need to be consoled.
But who of your kind will console you?
As parting words, I offer you only this assurance:
All living things share the same earth,
the same eventuality, all are destined to return to it.
It is, I imagine, easier for you to accept this,
for you had no pretentions beyond this life,
this planet, and so your going down was only
a small step from no imagined height.
VI
And now, you will pardon me if I lift you by
your tail and put you to rest in a setting
more suited to what you were once accustomed to,
one I believe you would approve –
beneath a quilt of brilliant fallen leaves.
Nothing special or symbolic, just a natural covering.
As for me, and the rest of my kind who walk this earth,
it is the dark light of life they have become
accustomed to, not the natural darkness
you, little mouse, have entered.
Rest, then, in that uneventful darkness.
Rest, my little friend.
Copyright ©
Maurice Rigoler
|