Funeral Oration For A Mouse

I have won the battle.

Though there were many skirmishes along the baseboard line that he won, in the end the battle was mine. He was an inventive mouse: Capable of infiltrating the dishwasher to eat un-scraped dishes and still-dirty silver. He eluded the mousetrap more than once, by painstakingly licking off the peanut butter until the trigger was bone dry.

It was sharp Cheddar that got him in the end. Cheddar that I pressed tightly against the triggering mechanism so that he would have his work cut out just to free a few bites. I haven’t killed many mice in my life. I’ve killed an enormous rat that lived in the basement of our old house, but not, I think, a mouse.

Unlike rats, mice are rather delicate creatures. One can’t help but think themselves a cartoon cat, full of evil and death. Hating them not so much as carriers of disease but for their independence and cunning.
But the mouse had to go.

My friend Michael sent me this poem by Alan Dugan as conciliation and I thought I’d put it in the Forum this week.

FUNERAL ORATION FOR A MOUSE

This, Lord, was an anxious brother and
a living diagram of fear: full of health himself,
he brought diseases like a gift
to give his hosts. Masked in a cat's moustache
but sounding like a bird, he was a ghost
of lesser noises and a kitchen pest
for whom some ladies stand on chairs. So,
Lord, accept our felt though minor guilt
for an ignoble foe and ancient sin:
the murder of a guest
who shared our board: just once he ate
too slowly, dying in our trap
from necessary hunger and a broken back.

Humors of love aside, the mousetrap was our own
opinion of the mouse, but for the mouse
it was the tree of knowledge with
its consequential fruit, the true cross
and the gate of hell. Even to approach
it makes him like or better than
its maker: his courage as a spoiler never once
impressed us, but to go out cautiously at night
into the dining room -- what bravery, what
hunger! Younger by far, in dying he
was older than us all: his mobile tail and nose
spasmed in the pinch of our annoyance. Why,
then, at that snapping sound, did we, victorious,
begin to laugh without delight?

Our stomachs, deep in an analysis
of their own stolen baits
(and asking, "Lord, Host, to whom are we the pests?"),
contracted and demanded a retreat
from our machine and its effect of death,
as if the mouse's fingers, skinnier
than hairpins and as breakable as cheese,
could grasp our grasping lives, and in
their drowning movement pull us under too,
into the common death beyond the mousetrap.

From "Poems", 1961