`One of His Harmless Creatures'

The apartment we rented on the third floor of a rambling Victorian hulk in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., was crowded with mice. With the coming of fall, they moved indoors for warmth and food. I remembered Guy Davenport setting out bowls of sugar water to attract bees and wasps, and secretly I enjoyed the company of rodents, but my wife was seriously repulsed. We were newly married and I hadn’t yet shed my desire to be gallant, so I bought a bag of spring-loaded traps, baited them with peanut butter and set them in the cupboards where mice had already gnawed boxes of baking powder, salt and habanero flakes.

Over one weekend I trapped 27 mice – 18 of them in a single night, mostly in the kitchen cupboard over the sink, which they reached by crawling up the plumbing in the wall. At one point I couldn’t keep up with the carnage, and while I was resetting one trap another was going off, sounding like a muted gun shot. I’ve never hunted and was vaguely sickened by the rodent slaughter, but confess to feeling a frisson of something, an unexpected excitement, usually only latent in my character – a taste for blood, you might call it. I thought of the Farley Mowat character in the film of Never Cry Wolf, played by Martin Charles Smith, roasting mice over a fire on a stick. These memories returned on Tuesday when I read Bill Coyle’s “A Mouse” in the April issue of The New Criterion:

“It crouches, what is left of it, in a corner of the terrace,
the length of my index finger and just
taller than my hand with the palm face down.

“Its bones are white and rough but delicate,
like limestone or seashell, or coral or snow.
It must have crouched all winter here.

“Still as stone, it resembles nothing
so much as one of those balsa-wood skeletons --
of dinosaurs, typically—that children assemble.

“Fearing death would hear it, it held its breath,
then stilled its heartbeat; fearing death would scent it,
it distributed its flesh to the ants for safe keeping.

“It made a little bed of dust
and leaves and the brittle hulls of insects;
it lay awake, sensing death near.

“When death stopped by, he stooped to consider it,
and taking it for one of his harmless creatures,
left a few seed husks to tide it over.”

Coyle’s poem recalls Richard Eberhart’s “The Groundhog,” with its marvelous conclusion:

“It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.”

But Coyle is more playful and less hopeful than Eberhart, whose poem always reminds me of Blake teetering between mysticism and madness. In the death of the groundhog, Eberhart sees evidence of a grand cosmic cycle – a return, in death, to life, or at least to the nitrogen cycle. Coyle’s death personified is cold and condescending. The final stanza echoes Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,/He kindly stopped for me.” You can outsmart death but not for long.

An addendum: That beautiful, vermin-ridden house we lived in as kid-free newlyweds burned down several years ago late on a January night. Mice gnawing the wiring? I thought immediately. A friend sent us a link to video footage of the flames – pulsing yellow and orange in a black abyss -- a painting by Munch or Rothko. No humans were injured but how many mice, I wonder, perished in the auto-da-fé?