Where did I leave off yesterday?
I stood at midnight with the mouse
caught in a cornflake box and rustling slightly.
What to do next? I stepped outside
into the backdoor tangle of thorns and roses.
I did not know my neighbors.
They’d be puzzled to see a cereal box
in their backyard. Good luck,
little mouse,
I said, as the box sailed
over the high fence.
Our next mouse crept
into an empty cider jug for the sweet dreg.
I stood the bottle up, a sad, sweet jail.
Almost at once she gave birth to a litter of six.
I carried the bottle of mice to Lincoln Park
and left the jug on its side, for easy exit,
under a sheltering bush. They were all
Beatrix Potter mice, dainty and lovable;
not the gross travesties of Disney.
I was lonely
with my husband away all day at work.
But after a wild party Kentucky Derby Day,
we too began to breed in Rapley Caves, under our thicket of
pipes
but not in a cereal box or cider bottle.
In the first cyclone to hit the eastern mid-Atlantic
we moved to New Haven in such a deluge
that canoes passed us on the Boston Post Road,
and driving into New Haven,
all the elms blew down behind us.
I survived a surfeit of tainted oysters
and gave birth to our first child.
He will be 55 next week.
Why am I telling you all this?