You may take my word
for their being very nearly as hard to herd
as people.
Whereas the curlew may “wheep” or “wheeple”
depending on the stretch of salt marsh
or other harsh
terrain from which it happens to hail,
a mouse will whisper-wail
a single ultrasonic
note that resonates through the chthonic
zones beloved of Hecate. A mouse will blithely throw
down this ultrasonic “hey for houghmagandie”
to attract the doe
some still take for eye candy.
With regard to the edible dormouse, glis glis,
on which the Romans loved to reminisce
long after they stopped roasting him in honey
and poppy seed, finally running out of dinner money
with the arrival of the Goths,
he’s scarcely cut from the same cloth
as the beastie overturned
by the plowman-poet Rabbie Burns,
himself subsisting on gruel and a little beef suet.
Despite the capacity to intuit
outcomes we now ascribe to Mus musculus,
it’s unlikely Rabbie—not much of a Latin scholar—
would ever have sussed
a mouse flexing itself under the skin of “muscular.”
To say she has “sweetie mice between the ears”
is to say she isn’t the keenest spear
in the rack, your own latest lady.
Situated as they are in a hot press or shady
pantry and incorporating foil off Polo mints,
blue-tinged lint
from a tumble dryer, fibreglass, Styrofoam,
their homes
are no longer those rural slums exposed by Rabbie
but penthouses taunting the tabby
with tabbed silk, buttonhole twist—all such pelf
as would befit any yarn-spinner
like myself
who’s also well-nigh resistant to blood thinners.
While it’s clear that Cooper drew heavily on Scott
for the plot
of “The Last of the Mohicans,” the psalm-singing Gamut
being a version, goddammit,
of Wamba the fool,
and Rebecca and Rowena are retooled
as Cora and Alice Munro, he also draws
on his own braw
dexterity much as a mouse will raid our autumnal
hoard with the aid of a thumbnail
that’s little more than a thumbnail sketch,
that rudimentary
development nonetheless allowing it to fetch
an illimitability of corn past Egyptian corn sentries.
You may take my word
that what you’ve faintly overheard
from library or laundry room is the shutting of a visor
followed by the tut-tutting of a steel-tipped incisor
as mice enter the lists
against any and every Ivanhoe. It’s all grist
to the mills at which they tilt. Sennacherib and sahib
have withered before the steel-tipped nibs
by which they take on the hellish
zone beloved of Hecate with something of the relish
and resolution ascribed by Conan Doyle
to a blowpipe-wielding Andaman Islander
till, holy shit, they’ve stripped the soy-oil
insulation from the wiring of your Toyota Highlander.
