It was a wooden puzzle, huge cubes glued
face to face; and they had gotten skewed
in the damp basement, by weights resting on them.
I wanted to wrestle them back into shape
(they were very light, I could lift them easily)
but when I twisted, one face broke off entirely.
We saw it was chewed on the inside;
in the center, a nest made of fibers.
You said, "The mouse is gone.
This is an empty nest",
but we did not dare touch it.
Then it moved.
The head, the whole of a sleek brown rat
poked out. It had never seen people before.
We were afraid of it, not it of us.
We rushed to trap it, held it upside down
till blood rushed to its head and it blacked out.
We caged it in an overturned wire mesh wastebasket.
It awoke and stared at us, with no idea
but escape.
Then I was telling you
about the terrible past, pictures I saw
(I could see them as I spoke to you) continually,
of the crash of a beautiful, delicate Zeppelin,
two of them, like pink glass Christmas balls
splintering over the ocean, onto the beach.
I was sobbing, trying to describe
just what I saw. You spoke, you were not listening,
and all this time the rat in the wastebasket
stared at us. It was thinking of biting the wire mesh,
it wanted out, it was thinking of that.
Two cats walked in. I thought they were strangers,
though their calico patterns were familiar:
it was their strange eyes, sharper than our cats. eyes
had ever been. But you stroked the larger one
and said you were sure it was ours: lumps in the fur
just the same way. When you spoke, I remembered
her. Where had she been for years? "One night
we took her for a long ride. We left her
by the side of the road, far away." She had come back,
and brought another. They stared at us, their eyes
were sharper than any cats of ours had ever had;
and the rat wept in the wire basket.
