A mouse by Bill Coyle - The New Criterion

Poems

A mouse

A poem by Bill Coyle.

Burke

was right!

It crouches, what is left of it, in a corner of the terrace,
the length of my index finger and just
taller than my hand with the palm face down.

Its bones are white and rough but delicate,
like limestone or seashell, or coral or snow.
It must have crouched all winter here.

Still as stone, it resembles nothing
so much as one of those balsa-wood skeletons—
of dinosaurs, typically—that children assemble.

Fearing death would hear it, it held its breath,
then stilled its heartbeat; fearing death would scent it,
it distributed its flesh to the ants for safe keeping.

It made a little bed of dust
and leaves and the brittle hulls of insects;
it lay awake, sensing death near.

When death stopped by, he stooped to consider it,
and taking it for one of his harmless creatures,
left a few seed husks to tide it over.

Bill Coyle's first book of poems, The God of This World to His Prophet, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize.

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