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.
No comments:
Post a Comment