RATS

In the walls, running along pipes

like a mob of white blood cells.

Sometimes things aren’t okay.

Rats in the pantry, the kitchen

of the mind. Rats in the mortgage, rats alive

and scurrying like a renewed fear of death.

Long in the teeth, long in need.

The change-purse hearts of rats under the floorboard.

Rats in the upper tier of the stadium, peering

over the railing, rats raining down

on the field. Rats in the maize, the long grass.

Rats underfoot, rats descending from overhead

like it’s Baghdad, 1999, and there’s oil to be had.

Rats the necessary gears in the mower.

Rats only one or two removes from us –

that is, they’re delicate and obnoxious

and consist mostly of water. Hanover rat,

brown rat, sewer rat, brush its shoulder off

because a rat’s a pimp too. Norwegian rat,

water rat, rats always the missing multiplier.

Researcher John Calhoun built a perfect, rat-sized

studio apartment and the rats he leased it to

drew and redrew themselves over generations

until they more or less evaporated.

Wharf rat, Old World rat. ‘RATS’: worth a whopping

four points, though given a random assortment

of 100 tiles, it could occur again and again and again.

Can you imagine playing with rats your whole life

and then, like Calhoun, being asked to meet the pope?

But Pope Paul VI was old by then and no longer steely

or spring-loaded. So while you consider rats,

with their glass-eyed guts that never shut,

don’t forget the rest of us poor unblinking sinners.