Spring 2003
New Series · Volume XXV Issue 2

Contents · Contributors · Selections · Editor's Notes & Cover Art

ROBERT WRIGLEY

MUMMY OF A MOUSE

Spit back to sun by an owl or a snake,
it’s a frail leather purse, gutless
and de-boned, stiff enough to hold
upright by the pink slip of its tail
until I see, peering into the gut’s open gash,
the sky comes through as two points of light
bilateral to the snout, a mouse-eye view

of the blinding cosmos. The question is,
as it always is, what now? That is, should I
save it, this sarcophagus of minimal skin,
this hide bauble mouse mummy, this
souvenir of vacancy and death?
I’ve got enough saved bones at home to build
a mythical beast, some bird wolf

or the spawn of a bison and a fish.
Back at the house, the skull of a gray whale
must always house a mouse or two,
and perhaps this sad-sack rodent himself tarried there
once, in the manner of prey, praying
in the manner of every fearful thing,
cowering inside the great gray brain chamber

of a beast a hundred thousand times
his size, like the last air bubble
or a dream of dying, like the soul
misunderstood and misconstrued,
like a man in the hand of God:
so tiny and powerless that, though it will do
no good, God whispers Go! Run! Run!
 

ROBERT WRIGLEY teaches at the University of Idaho. His sixth book, Lives of the Animals, will be published later this year by Penguin, which also published his Reign of Snakes, winner of the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award.

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