The Mouse Whole

This world. This Valley of Death
alive with my vibrating breath.

O masonried tube of doom,
can a mouse escape you
by squeaking tunes in your gloom?
By learning to shape you
to meaning, form, and relation?
O these are the joys of creation!

Squeak on, ye squeaks, O squeak!
At last I'd learned to rejoice
in the sound of my own small voice.
A voice...was it one voice only?
How lonely
that sounded, how bleak.
For where would my singing belong?
Would my only fruit be a song?
Had I in my rage to exist
turned into a solipsist--
uprooted, banished, exiled?

I'd been such a lonely child.
I'd always avoided my neighbors'
laughter, joking, and labors.
I'd creep up into our drain
and squeak some soulful refrain
whose haunting and sad repetition
seemed to speak of our mortal condition.
O loneliness--how it condenses,
refracts, through the lens of senses
unsmudged by the world's vulgarity,
all life to its ultimate clarity.

Then what could I feel? I could feel
my hind-paws wedged in the keel,
my scalp turning under the flap,
one forepaw down in my lap,
the other paw poised on the rail,
and deep in the stern my tail
that faithfully steered and sculled....

Yet my senses seemed strangely dulled.
How faded things seemed to have grown.
Here I was peaceful, alone,
all calm, the boat not leaking...
O to have heard someone squeaking!
Anyone. Mouse or....What was it?
When the mind's mirror clouds, what does it?
Alone. Was it simply my fright
as I drifted away from the light
that had old Nick as its keeper?
Or was it something deeper?

And now that light had vanished
to me, whom Nick had banished....
If it hadn't been for my scruples,
I might have been one of his pupils,
one of his chosen anointed.
Was that it?...Disappointed?
Goodness, I wondered, of what?
Had I wanted to stay there or not?
Stay there and be deflowered
and little by little devoured.
If I'd tried to root there and settle,
he'd have plucked me, petal by petal,
and cast me away, condemned,
when at last I was empty-stemmed,
when at last (to be less high-flown)
I was nothing but gristle and bone...
and then he'd have gnawed off the gristle
and picked me as clean as a whistle.

I pictured the sight and shivered.
Thank God that I'd been delivered,
that I'd boldly taken my chances
and countered his deadly advances
with such a despairing aplomb
that he'd turned from me, overcome,
and let me depart as I pleased.

If I'd tried to run, he'd have seized
me at once, and excited from chasing me,
done things he couldn't do facing me.
Magnificent moral precocity
prevented that dreadful atrocity.
Moral courage had made me victorious.
Could anything be more glorious?

And yet--that I'd shown such bravery
outfacing his noxious knavery,
that Nick's educational shelf
had revealed such a force in myself--
was that enough to explain
why maybe I'd wished to remain?
O who can fathom my actions
and the nature of Nick's attractions?
O Gide, O Freud, O Proust!
Was I itching to be seduced?

Did I long for something so awful?

I wept, shedding tears by the pawful.
They trickled down over my coat;
they dripped in the bilge of the boat;
but the verdict seemed inescapable:
I wished that I'd proved more rapable.

But what did that mean--seduction?
Did it always lead to destruction?
It meant that he'd found something sweet in me.
What made me think held have eaten me?
Was it he or I who was treating
love as a lust, like eating,
as something that overpowers
and, perhaps out of fear, devours?
Was he really the savage aggressor
or only a kindly professor?

Some students ran, and he followed them,
caught them--and probably swallowed them...
dull fellows who, though they'd boated
that far, weren't really devoted
and got destroyed by his system
when they tried to flee or resist him.
Did he lecture them, bore them, induce
them to flee, so he'd have an excuse
to attack them?...Then all his discourses
on secret miraculous forces
were only a trap that he'd baited....

But I'd sat fascinated,
till at last, completely nonplussed
by my fervor, brilliance, trust,
Nick opened his inner sanctum.
I should have been grateful and thanked him
instead of recoiling in fright.

In that dim and ghostly light,
his proposal had shocked and alarmed me,
but really--would it have harmed me?
Would it have damaged my health?
To take one's pleasure by stealth
regardless of stuffy morality
can steady the whole personality.
Here I wept tears by the sluiceful.
The experience might have been useful,
might have affected me tonically....

O why did I act so moronically?

And he let me go so easily....
I felt so small, so measly....
Dear old Nick, I just couldn't cotton
to him....I sensed he was rotten.
Yet he seemed so alive, so flourishing.
Like spinach: rotten but nourishing.

He was like the food I'd rejected
at home. "He's afraid it's infected."
My brother's words when he taunted me
came back to me now and haunted me:
"Afraid!"...It was rancid and soured!
Afraid: me, a finicky coward
who shrunk from the world around me....
My God, but it just about drowned me!
This world with those greens and Old Nick in it--
Did I think I could only get sick in it?
Did I think this sewer would poison me
if I let it stir any joys in me?

This sewer--was it really a sewer?
Or did it have an allure
that I, in a quest for the pure
that made this world seem rotten,
had never known--or forgotten?
As a sewer I've seen and presented it--
but what if I've only invented it?
Invented it out of my fears
and watered it now with my tears?
O what if this gurgling night
that holds no joy, no delight,
this bottomless pestilent hole,
is an image of my own soul?

O theory, proposal, rebuttal.
O that rat. He'd made me too subtle.

He'd made it all so confusing.
And here I was, aimlessly cruising
--where? Over waves. Did they flow where
I hoped? No, no, they went nowhere--
ever sinking away as I followed
until at last they were swallowed
in ultimate darkness below
with me borne along in the flow
through these terrors that lurked in between.

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