A 7-Year-Old Digs Up Her Dead Pet Mouse

She uncovers death in the backyard
because she misses life, the uncomplicated truth
of a small mouse burrowing into the whorls of her hair.

It looks just the same.
She brushes the dirt from its body and regards it,
considers how life becomes death all at once,
wonders at it, how she can hold both
in the palm of her hand.

This is so small it's almost
nothing. So large it's almost everything.
But she doesn't have the words for it, only
the weight of a body, the lightness of death, the heaviness
of love snapping and popping with nowhere
to make a connection.

She returns it to the earth. She piles the dirt on,
tamps it down, and goes in to wash her hands.
Her thoughts are curiously quiet for now.
There is a sense she's done something huge,
but she doesn't really know what it is.

The ghost of a song whispers in her head:
You're in my heart,
You're in my heart,
and she feels a lurch there. A secret something.
A tender hurt. But she doesn't have the words for this, either,
only everything, all this, this whole world.
It's too big, this, and so. So she will
go and ask her mother
for a piece of chocolate cake.

Slow, slow, you want to call.

You used to sit near an open window, a tattered pink spiral notebook open on the bed. You'd breathe in the scent of wet rain on rusted window screens and imagine that the breeze sliding through was a promise of something. And it was, the breeze soaked in moon and drenched in starlight, a promise you could feel in the knotted hollows of your bones, look how big the world is. It felt like yours, sitting there, pen in hand and your thoughts lifting up and up and up and out, ballooning into something tangible. These real, important thoughts, nothing more and nothing less than your fingers on the screen, your hand around the pen, the spiral spine of your notebook marking your arm with lines when you leaned forward, the pen, always the pen, the bubble-swirl of letters. You contained your breathless teenage stupid awestruck brilliant small looming pinprick specific peaceful wondrous ideas in the lines and loops of letters. Your heart raced. The world, oh, the entire world. You were it and it was you and you had some strange sense of entitlement when you wrote it all down. My world! My whole entire world!

And today you are less and not much more, the knotted hollows of your bones are filled too much with an aching worry, an ever-present concern for the state of things. You are always worrying about the state of things, and when you are not worrying about the state of things you are too silent. Too silent because you've retreated, working over a raw anger and hiding. You feel a sharp absence in the inside corner of your elbow, where you keep the memory of rain on screens and a feeling that the world could be yours if you found the right words to say it. You find wonder sometimes in the giggle gasp of your children laughing or the way light tiptoes its way through trees sometimes in the early morning, touching leaves and crossing distances in a way that comes close to meaningful. You are slower and you distrust too much joy. Joy is a two-faced harridan who offers warmth at one turn and goes cold too quickly. And your heart races, but not for the world, oh, the entire world. It races because you can sense in a curious way that you never did before, how quickly everything is rushing by. Slow, slow! You want to call. You want to grasp time's racing feet and drag it back to you by the ankles. You want to bloody its face and kick it into submission. But you watch it go instead, and you whisper. Every second murmurs. My world. My whole entire world.