The Mouse Whole 
by Richard Moore


Also by Richard Moore

POETRY

A Question of Survival
Word from the Hills
Empires
The Education of a Mouse
No More Bottom
Through the Keyhole
Bottom is Back

FICTION

The Investigator

ESSAYS

The Rule that Liberates

TRANSLATION

The Captives of Plautus


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The Mouse Whole

An Epic by
RICHARD MOORE

Foreword by
HOWARD NEMEROV

Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
—Horace
 
And he said unto him, Arise,
go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.
—Luke 17:19

A mouse is miracle enough
to stagger sextillions of infidels.
—Walt Whitman

Negative Capability Press
Mobile, Alabama
1995



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Negative Capability Press
62 Ridgelawn Drive East
Mobile, Alabama 36608

c  1995 by Richard Moore

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America
First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Cover Art: John Blee



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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank The Countryman Press, which published
Part I of this poem in 1983, and the editors of the publications
in which excerpts first appeared:

Light: "The Mouse's Wedding," 54 lines from Book IV
Negative Capability: "From a Mouse Epic: The Mouse's Poor
Appetite," the opening 140 lines of Book I; "From a Mouse Epic:
Tailless Dugan," 187 lines from Book IV
The Ontario Review: "From a Mouse Epic: The Mouse's Departure
from the Pedagogical Rat," the concluding 251 lines from Book II
Plains Poetry Journal: "From a Mouse Epic: The Seduction of
Genevieve," 339 lines from Book III



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In Memory of the Golden Mouse
 

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FOREWORD

It must be ten or a dozen years now since Dick Moore asked me to
read this tale of a mouse and tell him—Dick, not the mouse—what
I thought of it, and, if I thought well enough, to use my immense
authority in the world of letters to help get it published.

I hesitated a bit—as which of us wouldn't, Reader, on being
invited to read an epic in five books written by a mouse in
trimeter couplets?—but if hesitation was the first response
curiosity was the next and wouldn't leave me alone; what did this
mouse have to relate that was so remarkable?

The first thing that I found on reading was that this mouse—who
must remain nameless for now, as his name is not revealed until
Book Three—was continuously interesting and wrote his trimeter
couplets as well as most, with a somewhat byronic ingenuity at
finding some of the most horrifying rimes yet known to mice or
men.  Byron had done as ill and well as to match "intellectual"
with "henpecked you all" and "Euxine" (the Black Sea) with
"passenger e'er pukes in," and Moore's Mouse does quite as well,
or ill. Besides, this mouse had lived a life much more
adventurous and exciting and essentially critical than my own, a
quest for learning, love, truth and freedom prescriptive for the
growth of a mouse's mind and winding up, as other such journeys
have done, with life eternal achieved at last though as usual not
quite distinguishable from death, or dream.

The fact that I willingly offered my immense authority in the
world of letters to help get the poem published may not all by
itself be responsible for its having all these ten or a dozen
years remained unpublished; my powers, though great, are not all
that great. Indeed, as I remember it, it was only the mere three
publishers I thought my influence might be greatest with that
turned it down; were they men, we wondered, or mice?

But now the poem exists in the immortality of print, having
overcome even my help in making it to that state; imitating in
this respect, perhaps, the mouse himself, who in winning through
to a place among the stars successfully transcended (a) family,
(b) wife, (c) literary criticism, and (d) his Mouse, or Muse.

Reader, may you find as thoughtful a pleasure as I did, years ago
and now, in this tale of a tail about the sewers we build our
cathedrals on. If even a mouse may not merely survive but
prevail, what of ourselves? I think that we in the most advanced
society the world has ever known must acknowledge as deep an
affinity with the soul of a rodent as we did once before, when we
erected Disneyland upon the fortunes of a pair of mice.

Howard Nemerov
12 iii 78



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CONTENTS

PART I   The Education of a Mouse

Book I
Book II

PART II  The Marriage of a Mouse

Book III
Book IV

PART III The Apotheosis of a Mouse

Book V



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PART ONE
THE EDUCATION OF A MOUSE
BOOK I

Then scarcely a full-grown mouse
with a sewer instead of a house
(and a dismal sewer at that,
more suited, you'd think, to a rat)—
of my family the youngest member,
for as long as I can remember
I'd longed for a life more pure
than that to be found in a sewer.
I loathed the "unseemly stains"
that float down city drains:
the offal and the sludge
and all the various slimes
that caught in our corner at times
and stuck, and wouldn't budge;
the scraps of tainted meat
dumped down there from the street,
the thousands of rotten eggs,
the tons of coffee dregs,
the spinach, the peas, and the beans,
and the other assorted greens
and potato and orange peels
that my family collected for meals.

O how distasteful it was.
to fast—ah—to fast.
How sweet
never again to eat.
Until at last
(Distasteful though it was)
one does.

One has a magnificent feast;
one stuffs and stuffs like a beast.
But O, the guilt, the remorse
one feels, after every course:
one feels disgracefully gluttonous—
then gnaws something beefy or muttonous.

I was a sensitive soul.
My life in that dark hole
offended my delicate taste.
With a Civilization's waste
I remained unsatisfied;
and "Could there be an outside?"
I wondered, and watched those massed
and sluggish waters creep past
and gazed in the dismal distance
and dreamed of another existence.

My family thought me "heretic."
My father was unsympathetic.
He would say that I was so finicky
that I made him wish there had been a key
that would snap my little mouth open.
But my mother could put little hope in
such cruel (though witty) abuse:
such a key would be of no use
she insisted, as if in fear
such a key might really appear
and give me a terrible shock
since I really wasn't a lock.
She hated to see me maligned.
She tried to be tender and kind
and often, when we were alone,
would even attempt to condone
the curious ways that I acted:
perhaps a disease I'd contracted
might somehow have been the cause.
Then—after an awkward pause—
she had fears that I might have been fatally...
damaged somehow...prenatally.
Perhaps those coffee grounds
that father, swimming his rounds,
collected and carried home
while I was still in her womb,
and on which she'd mostly subsisted,
had made me so warped and twisted.

She'd felt so nervous, so torn
inside, before I was born...
and father had fumed and bossed
her about so ... I'd almost been lost.

My elder sister and brother,
who seldom agreed with my mother
and seldomer still with each other,
found their thinking in this the same.
They found me completely to blame.
My mother, they'd noticed, had spoiled me.
(She ought, said my sister, have boiled me
and served me up cooked in a stew.
My mother said that was untrue.)
The fact that I'd been so pampered,
they said, was what mostly had hampered
my normal and fruitful unfolding.
What I needed most was a scolding.
Poor mother was sadly deluded;
and thus they neatly concluded:

"When a mouse is allowed
    to be naughty,
he'll get overproud
    and haughty."

—Which my father would loudly applaud
till my mother was overawed.
Yet none would say why when I dieted
they were all so greatly disquieted.

But mother, dear mother,
how they all managed to smother
your generous inclinations,
with their loud talking,
their raucous, raw,
ridiculous orations
always balking
that sense of finer things,
of clear and untouched springs
or blue luminous skies
I sometimes saw
in your dim hairy eyes.

Such a sense, I am certain, shined
in the depths of her dim little mind,
and perhaps those others who'd brawl so
occasionally sensed it also;
for all their obnoxious abuses
seemed pompous evasions, excuses
to keep the truth from themselves:
that I was a creature who delves
into questions they wished unasked:
to a face they would rather leave masked,
as flesh better hidden in fur:
to the knowledge of what they were.
And how could they venture to dwell
on the thought of a delicate smell?
Suspicions of heavenly light
beyond their pestilent night
could only have brought them to know
their wretchedness there below.
Clear water would have acquainted them
with all the poisons that tainted them
and polluted their mind and spirit.
(No wonder they wouldn't go near it
when I found that fresh little runnel
a few feet down our tunnel.)
Whenever I wouldn't eat
some morsel of rancid meat,
they tasted the bitter curse
at the core of the universe.

We lived in a section of pipe
of the ancient stony type,
deserted long since and neglected.
At a place where sections connected
a crack—or perhaps a fault—
had crumbled the side of the vault
where roots had attempted to cramp
down through to where it was damp
and with slow resistless intent
had broken the solid cement,
as if something within had exploded.
The soil behind had eroded
and left a space recessed
where my family'd established its nest.

O little home
of mousehood mirth
now far away,
is your damp dome
of moldy earth
still there today?

Or have disputes
shaken your vault
with family trouble,
and some dark root's
thirsty assault
poked you to rubble?

The current that passed below
was calm as a rule and slow
but carried us little of use.
Downstream it entered a sluice
that was rich in nutritious stuff
but turbulent, noisy and rough;
and only my father much tried
to swim in that treacherous tide
among boards, old boxes, and slats—
and sometimes ravenous rats:
for my brother described to me once
how on one of our father's hunts
a rat leaped out of a pail
and devoured half of his tail.
He was lucky to flee with his life
back home to his squeaking wife.
It was this catastrophic mission
that had ruined his disposition
and, my brother continued slyly,
made him curse his family so vilely
and throw such terrible fits
poor mother'd go out of her wits.
Her behavior had to be wily
never to anger or bother
our morbidly sensitive father.

O, dear father,
though doubtless I should praise you
since it was my sweet lot
by you to be begot,
I'm sure it won't amaze you,
but O, dear father,
somehow I'd rather
not.

Those who in a spasm
of hot enthusiasm
thoughtlessly beget us:
how soon do they regret us?
The unseen drop they gave,
the driblet they presented,
a millionfold augmented,
returns, as from the grave.

O father,
what made you turn so pale?
Was it my long new tail?

Our world had a source of light
not far upstream to the right
where the glow from a passageway
distinguished our night from our day.
Each morning its gentle beam
would play on the bumpy stream
and glow through the hazy murk
as we rose to our daily work.
That passage—so luminous,
so faithful—was sacred to us.
At the end of every week
we gathered below it to seek
fresh comfort from its powers
and stayed there several hours.
Those sessions of peaceful devotion
were mainly my mother's notion
who believed in "Something Supreme."

"It's fine," said my father, "to dream.
But I put less stock in such feelings
than I do in potato peelings."

"Is this the time for your joking?"
mother'd answer, "the time to be poking
your fun at things so mysterious?
Do you ever try to be serious
or think who you're joking among
or how you're affecting the young
or think of our youngest child?"

My father wryly smiled:
"Can't I say that potato peelings
are good, without hurting your feelings?
They're delicious.  Perhaps I'm defeating
your hopes to improve his eating.
Every day he gets thinner and thinner.
Poor fellow, he can't eat his dinner.
He's dreaming.  But just the same
it's only myself who's to blame.
I can see that my guilt's prodigious."

"If you weren't so sacrilegious
and hadn't always cursed
and always looked for the worst
and been a more willing begetter
and loved your children better....
I try to think how we're blessed,
how things turn out for the best,
come out and grow up for good
if they're properly understood.
Just look at our growing mice.
Would you sell them for any price?
And look at our youngest baby.
he's a little ornery maybe
with his moodiness and his fasting.
But it never turns out to be lasting.
He'll drop his peculiar ways.
They're only a passing phase.
Why I think he's the best little mouse
we've got anywhere in the house."

Then mother grabbed and caressed me
before them—which somewhat distressed me—
and I squirmed: her guilty spurious
sentiments made me furious,
and there was my father observing.
What could be more unnerving?

And then he'd go on with his mocking,
and mother with finding him shocking,
till at last, if he still persisted,
her eyes became clouded and misted.
Father'd look for support from the others
in this latest gambit of mother's.
They were silent.  He'd say something breezy
and gay...then become uneasy
and stutter irresolutely—
then stop—and we'd all stand mutely.
Then he'd see that his humor'd gone stale,
and he'd twitch at the stub of his tail.

But that bringer of night and day,
that curious passageway
of which mother and I were so fond,
seemed the sign of some Great Beyond,
some radiance higher and truer
than the dark travail of our sewer.
Few mice seem disposed temperamentally
to think about life transcendentally,
and my brother and sister inclined
to be of my father's mind
when the family gathered below it,
and even found ways to show it,
by sneezing, for instance, or coughing
to show they were secretly scoffing
with father, who yawned and drowsed;
yet the fright that its light aroused
gave them all some faith to put in it,
and no one dared set foot in it,
not even my blasphemous father
(who "hadn't the time to bother")—
that is, no one excepting myself.

One day I climbed to the shelf,
where the passage was bright and dry,
and saw in the glittering distance
dark bars against the sky—
the sky whose very existence
was to me completely unknown.
How brilliantly blue it shone.
Drawn on by the light, by a fate
beyond mice, I crept to that grate,
which burned with a glow so intense
it seemed to shatter my sense.
A booming shook in my ear
and my body crawled with fear
when a shadow above me passed
with a rumbling deep and vast.
Was it Heaven out there?  Was it Hell?
I was ignorant.  How could I tell?
And I fled back into my hole.
Yet something began in my soul
on that tumultuous day
that was never to fade away.

I'd often creep to the edge
of the lowest part of the ledge
and gaze at that grated sky.
The passage was usually dry;
but once when the sky was gray,
down the darkened passageway
(which was, I learned later, a drain)
came torrents of turbulent rain.
Then suddenly I was aware
as it soaked in my greasy hair
and dampened my shivering flesh
that that water was almost fresh....

Ah! Could there be
    in Creation
    things free
of contamination?

Could there exist
    fresh springs
    that I'd missed
in the sewer of things?

Was the universe mined
    with wells
    I could find
and maybe sweet smells?

Many days I excitedly pondered
these thoughts—and pondering, wandered
right into the fresh little runnel
that leaked from the side of our tunnel
a few feet down the shore.
Why hadn't I found it before?
Was Heaven up there to show us
what earth conceals below us?
And I'd sit there musing alone
on worlds beyond us unknown.

My appetite grew worse.
My father continued to curse.
When I'd mention the runnel, he'd shout it
was nothing, he knew all about it.

"Well mother," he'd say, "in this phase he's
in now, he's bringing home daisies
and dreams of fresh water.  Fresh water.
Does he know what life is?  It's slaughter,
it's swim, fight, kill or be killed.
It's keeping your stomach filled."

My brother, though awfully afraid,
was learning the family trade:
the methods my father'd found
to keep from being drowned
or treacherously attacked
while swimming the cataract.
I foresaw that I'd shortly lose
my freedom to dream and muse
and that youth's long thoughts were fleeting.
I tried to restrict my eating.
I'd drink fresh water and brood
on this nasty craving for food
and think: if I could disdain it
completely, I needn't obtain it,
need I?  My father in rage
said I'd shortly become of age
and wouldn't have half my strength
when I'd reached my full-grown length.
O God, was there no way of slowing
this hideous process of growing?
I longed to vanish, to wilt
away.  Was it fear?

                                  Was it guilt?
Could mother see in my face
that I'd been in her holy place?

One day in a desperate mood
tormented by thoughts of food,
I clambered into that skylight
to wait for the hour of twilight,
and there before my view
was an object strange and new.

But how had it come there, I wondered?
And by whom to be nibbled and plundered?
I grasped a corner and chewed.
It certainly wasn't food.
Was it something the light of the sun
had somehow magically spun
and for unknown purposes left
down there in a favorite cleft?
Then Who was its Unseen Shaper?
It was made, I suspected, of paper—
not knowing what paper was.
(What mouse of that age ever does?)
I reviewed all my knowledge: in vain.

Then deep in my pea-sized brain
as I gazed at it long and fast,
I knew what it was at last,
and found all my theories absurd
as I struggled to shape the word:
it was an en-ve-lope.
I nudged it down the slope
and tried as I did so to guess
its meaning, its form, its address—
then saw with a swell of pride
that on its written-on side
near the corner I'd recently nibbled
the word "Personal" was scribbled.

I surveyed it ecstatically.
Then was it intended for me?
In my small but jubilant brain
as I inched it down the drain
wild thoughts ignited and spun:
had I been ordained by the sun
to accomplish the will of the skies
with this object before my eyes?

What awful responsibilities
fall on those endowed with abilities.
I resolved to accept the pledge,
and I nosed it down to the ledge—
to the ledge, where my happy discovery
lifted, slipped on the brink,
and vanished—beyond recovery:
for an envelope surely would sink
in those depths that gurgled below
where mice were unable to go
and be bared to the loathsome wishes
of snails, worms, cold-blooded fishes
who'd pick at it, sodden and torn....
I looked over the ledge to mourn
and bewail with swimming eyes
the loss of my Heaven-sent prize
as though it were Heaven's own daughter....

But there she sat on the water.

I watched her in bliss.  I doted.
The miraculous object floated.
It remained distinct from the slime
as if cleansed of the poisons of time,
of the murderous filth and decay
that resistlessly washes away
every noble thing of worth
in this dark and hollow earth.
Long after I'd passed through a drain,
that envelope there would remain.
"O carry me with you!" I cried—
but my squeakings echoed and died
through the tunnel's resounding caves
while that envelope bobbed on the waves.

But as I observed its motion,
a wild and unheard-of notion
rose up in my feverish mind:
was there some way I could find,
some method by which I could bind,
using all of my mousy wits,
my destiny firmly to its?

This thought seemed somehow related
to my hatred of all that I hated.
How often with yearning emotion
I'd pictured that sunlit ocean,
whose clear deep surface lies
and heaves under infinite skies,
that we mice knew dimly in fable.
Could that envelope somehow enable
a creature such as I
to sail out under that sky,
so luminous, golden, and wide?

"To sail!" and "Eureka!" I cried,
"That envelope knows how to float.
I'll put it to use as a boat.
Perhaps with its magic assistance
I'll discover that ocean's existence."

But there wasn't a moment to lose.
I slithered down to the ooze
where the object I thought so uplifting
little by little was drifting
downstream to the family house.

And suppose that it carried a mouse....
My family would all be amazed
and myself universally praised
beyond all question of caviling
for my modish method of traveling.

But there wasn't a moment to spare,
and I slipped and scurried to where,
a few feet up from our door,
it had lightly touched on the shore
and leapt out onto my craft:
and O, what a glorious raft,
I exclaimed, as the water held us
midstream (where my leap had propelled us).

But I must have committed some blunder,
for the raft began to go under,
and ever more frantic and worried,
round and round it I scurried,
backing and turning and twisting
to counter each sudden listing...
until I solved that riddle
by standing pat in the middle,
where at every hint of a lurch
I'd carefully shift my perch
and find in my body an answer
with the poise and skill of a dancer.
But for all my delicate trimming,
it sank, and left me swimming.

In disgust I swam for the shore.
The shore was our own front door,
to which, unawares, I'd drifted
while attempting to be uplifted,
and behind it was mother, peeking.
She must have heard me squeaking.
It all seemed a horrible dream.

I turned and swam downstream,
and two feet down with a shiver
climbed out of that stinking river
and sat on a stone in despair
and thought of my dripping hair
and how long it would take to dry...
then out of the side of my eye
saw the envelope floating by.
And I thought of the fatuous hopes
stirred up by envelopes
and of all the fools who must love them.
Was it the nature of them?
Or did only mice feel blessed
when they found themselves addressed
in unfamiliar writing
without the least inviting?

In the midst of these gloomy and dark
meditations, I thought of that mark
on it, "Personal"—meant for me—
and remembered the ecstasy
I'd felt when I found it new
and crisp—and what if I knew
how to use it?—and thinking how brave it
could be, I leapt in to save it.

I nosed it along the tunnel
to where the fresh little runnel
I'd found a few days before
gushed down through a groove in the shore,
near which was a rocky fjord
in which I could keep it stored
until I should either be through with it
or figure out something to do with it.
It hadn't been badly mauled,
I saw, when I got it installed;
and something waxlike coating it
kept the water from bloating it.
I noted all this with relief,
and hoping to soothe my grief,
I knelt down and washed in the brook
where it leaked from the tunnel, and took
a long and refreshing drink;
and then I sat down to think.

I thought of my dear close relatives
and of all the repulsive appellatives
they'd apply to me cruelly to mock
and make me their laughing stock....
Then losing all sense of time,
I sat on the rocks and the slime
and gazed at the sick yellow foam
and sought the strength to go home.

But when I arrived there that night,
they looked at me almost in fright.
Mother'd watched every curious antic
as out in the river and frantic
I'd attempted to stay afloat;
but she hadn't detected the boat.
It had heaved and rocked and surged,
but my weight had kept it submerged.
To my family's innocent thinking,
my ignominious sinking
was neither comic nor tragic:
for it all seemed the purest magic.
To my father, my sister and brother,
and especially to my mother,
who with her gaping daughter
had watched me walk on the water
and told the astonished others
(God bless all gullible mothers),
I'd seemed some kind of a demon
instead of an inept seaman.

But although I played up the part
with all of my mousy heart,
I sensed with a vague distress
it was failure they'd called a success
and that, if I'd really succeeded,
my success might have gone unheeded.
Does greatness, this made me wonder,
always hide some terrible blunder?
would the great ones be respected
if the mob ever really detected
the source of their marvelous powers,
the soil and the roots of their flowers?

But that night I'd a marvelous dream.
I saw myself by our stream
and up to me slowly drift
my inexplicable gift,
and it filled me as ever with awe;
yet with fierce and trembling paw
I began in the darkness to grope in it,
as if I were seeking to open it;
and when it came open, I cried,
and I joyously leapt inside,
and we floated away on the tide....

That morning I wakened with joy,
for at last I knew how I'd employ
that Heaven-sent object I'd found.
Though I stood some chance to be drowned,
I resolved that without delay
—the very first thing that day—
that I'd boldly tell them all
—yes, tell them, and let it appall,
and let them all rage and scoff—
that I meant that day to be off.

"You've been off for quite some time,"
said my father. "For my part, I'm
relieved and happy to find
one son so insanely inclined
as to set out in search of oceans.
Your mother with her fine notions
and even my sensible daughter
have told me you walk on the water.
I'm not the one to deny it,
so go on out there and try it.
But when you get ready to leave,
don't expect me to stand here and grieve."

"O how can you be so cruel,"
cried mother. "Be careful or you'll
make him leave out of nothing but stubbornness.
Do you think you can find any rubberness
in that stiff little neck of his?
You know how stubborn he is.
But I think you want him to leave.
He's always been your pet peeve.
You saw that his mother favored him,
and so you never much savored him.
I think you were just plain jealous.
So now you've got the nerve to tell us
that you don't care if he'll sail or not.
But you cared if he had his whole tail or not!"

She was wild, with her bulging eyes
not easy to recognize
—and the fur ruffled over her face.
My father turned in his place
as she circled him, calling him names
and recalling his deepest shames.
He seemed for the moment bewitched;
but his tail-stub fitfully twitched,
and his chin was visibly quivering,
and we children waited, shivering.
Would she shout him to death, I wondered?

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" father suddenly thundered.

The echoing cave fell still.

Then mother resumed with a will:
"You made him the butt of your laughter.
And why?  He'd taken after
his mother—for no other reason.
You thought it was family treason.
You saw that his mother loved him,
so you taunted and bullied and shoved him,
so he dreamed of a place that was sunny,
so your laughter wasn't so funny,
so he's said just now...

                                        "THAT'S ENOUGH!"

"O stop that threatening stuff."

But she'd hardly said this when she saw
that he'd raised his right front paw;
and again the room grew still.

Then her eyes began to fill:
"Not a word about his survival....
You were angry at his arrival.
When I bore him, you said..."

                                                    "THAT'S ENOUGH!"

The paw looked hard and rough.
The silence grew deep and hollow,
and I waited for something to follow.

But the storm and the thunder had passed.
Too windy and rainy to last,
mother's squalling, quelled by a shout
from father, had blown itself out.
She sat there in lachrymose gloom.

My father had left the room
(No doubt held gone off to brood
on the risking of life for food
and the folly of him who fetches
the food of ungrateful wretches),
and mother saw us there waiting,
the results of her lifetime of mating,
and whimpered in deep remorse
and said in a voice grown hoarse
(yet to make up for how she was voiced,
her misty eyes were moist
and glittered, saintly and starry):

"O my dears, I'm so terribly sorry
we have to have scenes like this
and you poor dears never miss
a thing that we do or say in them
and see all our faults on display in them.
Your father is so sarcastic,
so hide-bound, so inelastic...."

"He certainly is," said my brother.

"He's what?" requested my mother.

"Why, hide-bound, sarcastic, mulish,
and sometimes downright foolish.
Each time he kicks up a row,
I can't imagine how
you've managed to get along with him."

"Are you saying there's anything wrong with him?"
retorted my mother in fury.
"D'you think you're a judge and a jury
to pass judgment on someone like him?
You hardly know how to swim.
Why I'll tell you a thing or two,
and believe me, it's nothing new:
your father's the finest gray mouse
you can point to in this whole house
and maybe in this whole sewer,
and sometimes I think that you're...."

I thought that I'd best interrupt;
I hated to seem abrupt,
but they might have gone on forever
and spoiled my entire endeavor,
so I said it was time I got started.

"My son...I'll be broken hearted,"
cried mother—her tears began flowing.
"You don't really mean that you're going?
Poor dear, we all so neglect you,
so you said that to make us respect you.
It's a story you've only repeated
because you've been vilely treated.
You heard it somewhere in a tale
('The Mouse Who Went on a Sail')
when our relatives came to dinner—
that awful Uncle Skinner!
Your father's family...to think...
but my son, you'll certainly sink.
And with no one at all around
to save you from being drowned....
My son, you must be delirious.
You certainly can't be serious.
I knew it was nothing but talking."

"But mother, you've seen me walking..."

"O yes dear, I know—and I've known it.
all along I've...and now you've shown it.
and you made your mother so proud.
the things you won't do, if allowed.
how did you?...I'll bet that I've guessed.
You've been into my medicine chest,
and you've swallowed some kind of a potion.
But it won't make you walk on the ocean.
You'd best stay home with your mother...

"O rats!" interrupted my brother.
"Just let him go if he wishes.
Let him say hello to the fishes.
Let him go. I mean that seriously.
All his life he's been acting mysteriously,
as though he didn't belong here.
He thinks there's something wrong here.
What else does he mean by his fasting?
It's a method he's found of contrasting
himself with all the rest of us.
He sneers at the whole squeaking nest of us.
Whatever we treasure or prize
he imagines he has to despise,
and all that the family's gained
little sonny's politely disdained
and politely but firmly rejected.
He's afraid that it's somehow infected
and that he's too pure to swallow it.
It's his idea: let him follow it.
Let him go and get a good souse;
then he won't be upsetting the house."

Though he'd misconstrued my behavior,
I saw in my brother my savior,
and with all the guile known to mice
I endorsed his sarcastic advice.
I pleaded and wheedled and urged....

"But you're sure that you won't be submerged?"
mother asked. "This thing that you've got:
will it keep you afloat or not?
This floating I've never understood."

I assured her it certainly would.
Could mother doubt me? Her question
niggled. A dream's suggestion
has all I had for surety
I'd float to that Realm of Purity.
I'd wanted to work out alone
the method the dream had shown
which now seemed obscure and hazy.
If I failed, they'd think I was crazy,
impractical. I would be shaken,
sneered at....This risk must be taken.

"I keep her," I said, "by that brook.
Shall we go there and have a look?"

"Is that what he calls his craft?"
father cried, and derisively laughed.
They'd all come along—all four—
and stood there high on the shore
while I scurried about beneath.
I gripped my boat in my teeth
and pulled her out of her dock,
a crevice deep in the rock:
but how could I keep her moored
in the water to climb on board?...
I trembled deep in my bones
as I pulled her among the stones
that lay half sunken about
(deposited there, no doubt,
by our tunnel's gradual crumbling)
for I heard my father mumbling:
"Is that what he's found of use
out of all the things in the sluice—
a thing he can hardly move?
God knows what he's trying to prove."

'All I do,' I thought, 'he mocks.'
And I dragged her between two rocks,
so she lay there poised in the stream
as she had last night in the dream.
Then I clambered up on a stone....
What was it the dream had shown,
I frantically tried to recall
as I crouched there—the dark little ball
of my body all slimy and dripping—
being careful to keep from slipping
and thinking how all of them watched....
O God, and what if I botched?
When I thought of the risks I was taking,
all four of my knees started quaking.

'He thinks I'll be overawed,'
I thought; and I angrily pawed
and lifted the envelope's flap
until with a muffled snap
it hinged up high and wide
and came down on the other side.
I held it down with a paw.
Then over the edge I saw
that inside was a narrow space,
and I arched my tail to the place,
and it yielded, though not very much,
to my tail-tip's tentative touch.
Then with fore-paws tenaciously gripping
the rock to keep me from slipping,
I eased my hind-quarters around.
And then—Ah bliss—I found
that I slowly began to nestle
down into my tiny vessel;
and I seated myself amidships.
My hind-paws, belly, and hips,
which I carefully wedged inside,
opened the envelope wide,
while under its flap my snout
was free to swivel about
and sniff at the passing airs
as water dripped from the hairs
of my forepaw, dangling out.

My family sent up a shout
in which I heard no mocks
as I pushed with my paws at the rocks
and my vessel slid smoothly away
and lightly began to sway.
I had to use all of my talents
to keep the contraption in balance,
but she worked, O she worked! And I knew
that the dream I had had was true
and at last I was under way.

I heard mother quietly pray;
then her prayer turned into a wail;
then she stopped and, "Have a good sail!"
she called through her tears and sobbing.
And I thought as I sat out there bobbing,
'She sounds as though I intend
a morning's trip to the bend.'

Ah, mother, how did it seem?
A remote, unbelievable dream?

You probably had a hunch
I'd be home for an early lunch.
The others stood awkward and mute;
and every family dispute,
both of their and of my own making,
seemed resolved in my undertaking.

And suddenly I grew prouder
and my heart beat a little louder
underneath my sticky fur;
for I knew nothing now could deter
my escape from that dismal sewer
out into the Realm of the Pure:
that, perhaps after terrible troubles,
I would float at last on its bubbles
and, after hard jolts and jars,
see sunlight and moonlight and stars.

BOOK II

Up the tunnel the round faint glimmer
of home grew smaller and dimmer—
like a moon backing out of the sky,
no one watching on earth knew why,
receding from night so sadly—
as if someone had treated her badly.
My family was there on the shore,
but visible now no more
as the dark closed in all around,
the dark into which I was bound.
And even that glimmer would go
when the current's relentless flow
had carried me down to the bend.
Was there light at the other end?
But O, how it now seemed so far,,
where sunlight and moonlight are
—or are they? (I suddenly thought)
and here I am, helplessly caught
in a stream going nowhere at all....

Did I hear my mother call?
They were there—still were—in the gloom
—or were they? You had to assume—
assume that the things about you
went right on existing without you
in a world that would still continue,
though vanished without and within you
as you wandered far and wide
in an envelope lost on the tide,
attempting to picture your past....

And then it eludes you at last,
and you feel so hopeless without it
you begin in despair to doubt it
and speculate long and darkly
on theories deriving from Berkeley.
(Worse yet: when you don't know that name,
you can have those thoughts just the same.)

But you have to believe that it sleeps
in its own and your dark deeps,
in the depths of your gurgling brain
like a family of mice in a drain,
and accept this sleeping reality
in its non-existent finality—
a conception no mind can avoid
according to someone named Freud.

You had to accept the dregs
of coffee, the rotten eggs,
the spinach, the peas, and the beans,
and the other assorted greens,
and the morsels of tainted meat
swept down from an unknown street...
O those jovial family meals,
those delicious orange peels
that we sometimes had for dessert....
When I lay somewhere bleeding and hurt,
who would come to staunch my bleeding?
And what would I do about feeding,
now I was drifting into
a world that I'd never been to?
O those wonderful orange peelings!

And I cursed my delicate feelings
that had driven me into that gloom
that would doubtless turn into my tomb—
or my crypt—I was wondering which,
when my haunch had a furious itch:
a flea—and I wiggled to scratch it
and darted a paw to catch it
before it could hide in my coat—
but I nearly upset the boat.

While musing so sadly and direly,
I'd forgotten my vessel entirely;
and that magical Heaven-sent gift
in which I'd determined to drift
courageously and alone
down into that dark unknown
had almost ceased to buoy me
because a flea could annoy me.
The thought made me shiver and sweat:
how easy it was to forget.

If it hadn't been for my tail,
that flea would have ended my sail;
but thanks to that organ's agility
and the envelope's flexibility,
I'd kept on an even keel:
its delicate sense of feel
extending deep in the stern
detected the slightest turn,
the minutest sway or dip
of my fragile and papery ship;
and while I was unaware
of all but that flea in my hair
till I found the whole vessel tipping,
my tail was tenaciously gripping
and counteracted the list
with a deft and powerful twist
in the opposite direction
which righted my craft to perfection.
I not only steadied the hull with it:
I even found I could scull with it.

O tail, O tail,
thou fulcrum and thou lever;
thou rudder and thou oar;
thou hinge upon the door
of my great squeaking endeavor,
which opens, as I hope,
into a bright beyond;
thou secret bond
between this envelope
and him who rides it;
thou means by which he guides it
unknowing, unawares;
thou thing devoid of hairs;
thou secret sense
subtler and more intense
than all intelligence;
thou purer
intuition
far surer
than volition;
guide me to what I seek!

Who said that the flesh was weak?
that flesh was of no avail,
that flesh was doomed to fail?

He couldn't have had a tail.

But suddenly all went dark.
My fragile and bouncing barque
spun round and rolled and pitched.
My God, is this tunnel bewitched?
was the first thing I frantically wondered
as the darkness above me thundered
and echoed through unseen caves
with the roar of invisible waves
around me splashing and churning
and making me dizzy with turning
and bumping on flotsam and jetsam
as I clung there frightened and fretsome—
had the waters of Hell broken loose?

Then I realized I'd entered the sluice.

O vast and horrible hole;
O darkness of the soul;
O life, so swirling and furious,
miasmal, dismal, injurious;
O life that was father's undoing;
what terrors now are you brewing
in your boiling and fanged interior?
Will I prove my father's inferior
and go home at last at a crawl
without any tail at all?

O terrible tunnel;
in your dark depths do you funnel
stray mice with your other debris
out into the open sea?
Do you send them out there alive?
Or do you deprive
them all of their breath
before they arrive?
Is that ocean merely my death,
the end of my passionate yearning?
Ah, what deep wisdom I'm learning.

O dark fate,
dropped down to me through that grate,
my only companion, my gift,
O deep and relentless motion,
can we only discover that ocean
by setting ourselves adrift?
Is there no way of solving
your riddle, O sewer,
without this threat of dissolving?

O life, thou gradual dying!
O hairs, with no hope of drying!

How long I went on without light
through that roaring and hideous night,
that awful invisible vision
of monstrous shapes in collision
with hollow booms and crashes
and ominous nearby splashes
in that wild and capricious current
with my tail as the only deterrent
from getting myself overturned,
was something I never discerned:
I had neither the means to measure
the passage of time, nor the leisure,
but sat there and ached and sweated
with my hair getting constantly wetted
by the gummy spray and the spume
shooting out of that seething gloom.

My tail was steering with skill;
but the boat was beginning to fill.
I clutched with a paw at the rail
and tried with the other to bail;
but I feared that the sewer was gaining,
for in spite of my splashing and straining,
the ooze, like a soup or a jelly,
was sloshing about my belly,
and I sensed, though my senses were groggy,
my envelope getting, soggy,
for the surface inside was porous.
"O God!" I cried, "Don't ignore us!"

But God didn't seem to hear me;
and I moaned as my end drew near me:
for facing one's death isn't easy—
and besides, my stomach felt queasy
from all that bouncing and bobbing.
Was death really coming? And robbing
my life of its proper fruition?
Would I die without recognition
far short of my destination,
a failure? O bitter frustration!

Then what were all hopes? Worthless.
I laughed. (My laughter was mirthless.)
Then grimly I spat out a curse
at the sickening universe:
"O come with your foul malignity,
death! I wait with dignity,
wait in my dripping hair."

And then in a wave of despair,
I yielded myself to the night....
But what did I see? A light.
It seemed suffused over stones.
I became aware of my groans
in the midst of that cataract's roar,
and I silently sculled for the shore
beginning so hugely to loom
like a ghost from the depths of a tomb.
My God, am I dead already,
I thought, as I entered an eddy
that swung my vessel around?
My God, and what if I've drowned?
Did I hear a Heavenly psalm?
The waters were growing calm.
Is that light from some Heavenly fire?
Do I hear a celestial choir?
O God, I've certainly drowned.
And then I ran aground.

The shore had a gentle slope.
I climbed from my envelope
and drew her up on the land;
and I tried to understand,
as I sat there confused and alone
on the solid, though slippery, stone,
what refuge this was I had found.
Could it really be that I'd drowned?
Was I still in the same existence?
The cataract roared in the distance.
Yes, still in the depths of the night.
But above from a fathomless height
a faintly luminous ray
seemed to feel out its airy way
and, pallid and weakened, fall
down the length of a cavernous wall
and expire in darkness below.
A sort of breeze seemed to blow;
my snout felt its gentle pressure,
and the odors it carried seemed fresher
than the stench from the stagnant foam
that had welled up around our home.
Near here was where father'd collected
the food I'd so often rejected.
had he known that the turbulent roar
was calmer along the shore?
Had he come to this place and sat?
And where had he met with the rat?

I swallowed with sudden fear.
There behind me—what did I hear?
I darted around in fright.
Had something there moved to the right?

My furry chest was mounding
as I stared in the darkness surrounding:
the bodiless wall of the dark.
Something moved. A shadow. A spark.
Two sparks. Then the sparks were eyes
in a shape of enormous size.
I wanted to run to escape
that horrible monstrous shape,
those glaring and ravenous eyes...
but I lacked even strength to rise.
Yet the thing was advancing closer.
I worked my mouth, but, "O, Sir..."
was all I could manage to say.

"Well look what's happed by the way:
A mouse. Just calmly sitting.
I squat here and tend to my knitting
and watch the world go by,
and as soon as I shut one eye
to rest my bones with a snooze:
A mouse.  You taking a cruise?
That's dangerous. Where you from, boy?
Aw come on....You deaf and dumb, boy?...
Aw tell papa something nice.
I've a taste for the tales of you mice—
that's a pun, boy—or should I say, 'girlie'?
You look like your hair'd be curly
if you'd ever let it get dry."

I struggled to make a reply,
but I couldn't. I seemed entranced
as the apparition advanced.
Great whiskers appeared. Then teeth.
Then a powerful jawbone beneath.
A face drawn into a frown.
Huge claws. A body all brown
and furry and—horribly fat!

"Aw come on. Say hello to the rat.
You frightened? You do look nervous.
It's only Old Nick—at your service."

He crossed a paw to his breast,
and as if held just addressed
a large and admiring crowd,
he ceremoniously bowed
and smiled with mock humility,
a picture of perfect gentility.

"Then you won't devour me, mister?"

"What a girl he...I couldn't resist her.
'Devour,' he says, 'Devour me.'
You'd think he aimed to deflower me.
I'm shocked at the very suggestion.
You'd upset my fickle digestion.
Did you get that word? It was 'fickle'.
It rhymes with 'pickle' and 'tickle.'
'Devour.' He said that. 'Devour me.'
I suppose you don't think you'd sour me.
Now don't go throwing temptations.
You'll ruin our early relations.
Yeah I caught one once by the tail;
it was just a little stale,
and I spat the thing right out.
What a thing to be talking about
to a poor little innocent mouse
who's lost the way to his house—
so vulgar. Forgive old Nick.
But the thing almost made me sick."

"M-Mister."

                      "Yeah?"

                                      "W-Was it all
of his tail—perhaps you recall—
or perhaps it was only a half."

I heard a strange little laugh.
"Well if that's not the darndest question.
How should I know? It spoilt my digestion.
Do I have to go into details?
And describe what you do with tails?
Do I have to spell it all out?
Don't you know what it's all about
with the flowers, the bees, and the birds?
Do I have to use four-letter words?
These mice with their dirty minds.
I could spank their little behinds.
These awful village idiots.
I sometimes think what a pity it's
rats who must serve as the teachers
for such poor unwashed creatures.
Our wild and callous youth.
Have they any reverence for Truth,
for that ray of Heavenly Light
that pierces our earthly night,
or the rat who devotedly bothers?..."

"But I thought it might be my father's...."

"If they'd just think some of the time.
But they sit there and think that I'm
some superannuated playboy
who goes collecting...but say, boy,
what are you doing here?"

His petulance filled me with fear.
But I screwed up my courage to answer:
"I'll tell you as much as I can, Sir.
I've set out in search of the ocean."

"That so. Well Land of Goshen.
(That's a paradox, calling it land,
and a reference you won't understand.)
My God, not another of those.
Where they all come from, God knows.
Out of their muddy holes
with their beautiful sensitive souls;
high-minded pure young males
with delicate quivering tails
and metaphysical doubts
(I wish they'd wipe their snouts)
all upset by the world's decay:
there's too little light in the day—
and the night's so dark, it's awful,
and permits things vile and unlawful.
Yeah who'd even want to nap in
a night where such things can happen?...
Poor delicate souls all alone
in a world that was never their own,
a world of cement and stone
without any live vegetation;
and so rank with contamination,
so perilous, smelly, and slippery,
so full of nonsensical frippery
floating around in the sluice
without any purpose or use;
a world that won't understand them,
but tries all the same to command them
to forget about truth and beauty
and go out and hunt for booty
and wear themselves out with labors
collecting more scraps than the neighbors—
and to feed on those festering morsels
that float all around their doorsills
till they themselves turn rotten—
and die—and are quickly forgotten.
Yeah isn't it tragic and sad?
Too bad it's the best to be had."

"To be had?"

                          "Yeah their elders all blessed it,
but they find it so hard to digest it,
this life without purpose or meaning.
They've been victims of improper weaning.
They never got loose from their mammas
who left 'em with terrible trammas."

"Trammas?"

                        "A word meaning 'dream.'
It connotes that you're off the beam....
So rejecting the world in disdain,
they dream underneath some drain
of how they could be so enlightened—
if the light didn't make 'em so frightened.
O the sorrows of mouse mortality:
the bewildering unreality.
O it can't be real or nutritious.
Yeah maybe it's all fictitious,
this stuff that floats in the stream,
just a dreadful upsetting dream.
Gob after stinking gob:
it must be a put-up job.
So they curse every earthly fetter
and dream about something better,
and imagine some magical portal
they can pass through and be immortal."

"Immortal?"

                      "Yeah, and abscond
out into the Great Beyond;
or to say it in plainer words,
they go out and look for the birds.
But en route to the infinite spaces
they stop off here of all places
and raise a big hue and commotion
and ask me the way to the ocean
and whether this world they despise
will float 'em out under the skies.
So I tell 'em something like this:
it's a rare and exclusive bliss
and only the pure in spirit
can ever even get near it.
Without years of disciplining
you can't even make a beginning—
and years of steady refinement
to get your mind in alignment
with the properest canons of taste.
I warn my lads to be chaste
(That is, not to chase female mice),
but they seldom heed my advice.
If they'd self-possession or prudence...
that's all I can give to my students.
God knows, I may be unfit;
but I teach as my lights permit."

"You must be a powerful teacher."

"Why aren't you the charming creature.
These mice are raised so genteelly.
I feel myself flattered really.
Was it mamma who taught you to flatter?
That's only my aimless chatter.
I do have a weakness for speech.
They say it's what's needed to teach.
And you know it's strange, God knows—
did you know I don't speak in prose?
I rant and digress—even curse—
but it always comes out in verse.
Even cursing the filth and the slime
I can't help making it rhyme.
You've probably noticed the fact.
That could be why I attract
the mice who are all so uplifted
and tell me I'm strangely gifted.
I ought to keep modestly quiet,
but it really is hard to deny it
or see how my gifts could be greater—
for which I thank my Creator."

"But you say that I'll have to stay here
perhaps as long as a year?"

"Is there something the matter with that?
Does it pain you to speak with a rat?...
Well you look like a promising boy.
They're the kind that I most enjoy.
You might pass through pretty quick.
Just leave it to good old Nick.
You certainly won't be the first
in whom I've quenched every thirst
and opened the way out there
to the sky and the fresher air—
where the sea-gulls sit on the billows
as wispy and fluffy as pillows
and little birds chirp in the willows
by the side of the ocean's foaming,
and the stars come out in the gloaming
along with the fragrant moon
who plays you a gay little tune;
and then the sun also rises
and fills the world with surprises
and birds and buds go atwitter
in its warm voluptuous glitter
and everything's blue and gold
—as described in the tales of old:
I haven't been out there myself.
my duty's right here on my shelf,
right here minding my P's and Q's—
while I try to keep up with the news
of how all my boys are doing,
and thanklessly labor, construing
to unwashed gents, who stammer
their lessons in squeaking and grammar.
They wouldn't have got to the ocean
without my love and devotion.
It was Nick who taught 'em all how.
They try to forget him now.
Would you guess? Never once have I heard
so much as a peep or a word."

"Maybe word doesn't go upstream."

"Maybe so. But I stick to my theme
and teach bright lads how to get there
and warn them it's stormy and wet there."

"Stormy?"

                   "Yeah thunder and lightning,
and violent winds—quite frightening—
and water comes out of the sky
(come up closer—don't be so shy)
fresh water. It's known as rain.
Have you ever been up in a drain?
Then you'd know what I'm talking about."

"You mean where you go and look out
and everything's shining and blue?
We'd a drain where we lived too.
And I think one day I met
that rain....It made me all wet."

"Yeah it does that. Aren't you bright.
Then you know where we get our light.
(Come on now and have a seat
and take a load off your feet.)....
Did you know that's a drain up there?"

He smoothed my ruffled-up hair
as I cautiously sat beside him;
but when I suspiciously eyed him,
he turned his grizzled face
and pointed a paw to the place
where that lofty and luminous ray
came in from the light of day;
and I edged away from him slowly.

"It seems so majestic and holy,"
I said with a voice full of feeling.

"It's a hole, all right—in the ceiling.
It's funny how mice seem to love it."

"I wonder what's out there above it.,'

"God knows. It's a great attraction.
Maybe it shines by refraction,
or perhaps it's only reflection.
But they come here from every direction.
You'd think I was running a shrine.
It's a job to keep 'em in line."

"Do you really conduct a school?"

"Yeah I serve as a kind of fuel
that inflames my students' desires.
We feed our mutual fires
until they want to run loose....
So I don't have to go in the sluice.
It's such a big bother and fret.
Why get myself all wet
out hunting for gristle and suet?
My brothers-in-arms all do it,
but you know, it's a little bit risky."

"For you?"

                    "Yeah I'm not so frisky,
and not so quick on the trigger.
If I were a little bit bigger...."

"You seem enormous to me."

"If you saw my family tree.
It's a little long for a rat.
I'm a kind of aristocrat.
Aw come on now, confess it,
and tell me you'd never guess it.
That's why I'm not so big.
I'm the last degenerate twig
from some big healthy lunk
who provided the tree with its trunk."

"Excuse me, but what's a tree?"

"This advanced illiteracy.
They're one of Nature's glories.
Don't you know the traditional stories?
These mice. I keep on praying
and hoping, but—as I was saying,
I just haven't got the brawn.
So it's lucky you mice are drawn
by that curious light above.
(God knows what it's the symbol of.)
But they seem to want to be taught.
So I teach 'em as much as I ought
(and sometimes a little bit more)
when I find 'em here on my shore,
so tender, so young, so devout.
Now what was I talking about?"

"You were talking about the drain.
Out there in the sky and the rain
in that luminous paradise
are there creatures like rats and mice?
I climbed ours once as a child
and heard loud noises. So wild,
such a terrible shaking and rumbling,
as if the gods were grumbling
and whizzing and whirring and whining
up there in their terrible shining
and banging and booming and clattering.
There was even something like chattering.
Strange voices seemed to be speaking.
But it wasn't at all like squeaking.
Was I hearing the language of spirits?
Was it Heaven? And had I gone near its
luminous vibrating center,
that I should have had courage to enter,
forsaking this world for good—
as a braver mouse doubtless would?
Was it Heaven? It sounded like Hell.
O Sir, perhaps you can tell."

"Yeah who ever stops to wonder
what kind of a world we're under
that loads up our world with its scraps?
They get made down here perhaps,
and all this filth is our own.
But what wise guy's ever shown,
if it's so, exactly where?
You can see a world up there.
Any ninny knows that.
You don't have to be a rat
to know that, but what I'd like to know,
do they know of us below?
Those creatures that live up there,
are they even the least bit aware
of what goes on below them?
You're a fellow who seems to know them.
Go figure that one out!"

His voice had come close to a shout.
What made it, I wondered, so loud?
Then, seeing me silent and cowed,
he took up a quieter tone:

"Yeah all these things are unknown.
some say there was once a time
without so much garbage and slime
when the gods looked down with more favor
and the world had a pleasanter flavor.
We have hints in our oldest traditions
of an earth under different conditions.
(Ain't it nice when I don't have to holler
and can talk like a dignified scholar.)
The ancient fables and stories
all tell of marvels and glories
we don't know a thing about
and leave, some think, little doubt
that we once had a place more open
than these caverns we now have to grope in.
But it could be just that we're dealing
with deeper perceptions and feeling:
a profounder imagination.
When they tell about live vegetation
and juicy and sunlit greens
in fragrant and spacious scenes
where the spirits of rodents can frolic,
it could be merely symbolic.
Such visions could all be suggested
by things that have always infested
existence right here by the sluice.
We have greens. They even have juice.
We note when we pick up a shred
that it smells like something dead,
and decide that it once was alive.
But the Ancients, I'm sure, could arrive
at the same elementary decisions,
and quickly expand them to visions
of plants and trees and flowers—
they had such miraculous powers.
So it's hard to escape the conclusion
that the World Beyond's an illusion;
and it follows that what have declined
are really our powers of mind."

"But if those greens were alive...
then where...?"

                           "But I wouldn't deprive
the other side of its views.
Our positions at times even fuse,
although they appear so polemic.
One mustn't be too academic.
Those deeply ambiguous fables
defy all our scholarly labels.
The amazing and thrilling perfection
of almost the whole collection,
their grandeur, their sweep, their regality,
God knows, has the force of reality.
And reality may be involved.
It's a problem that hasn't been solved....
It's as if some mystical tether
bound Spirit and Cosmos together.
Some fleshy and sacred splicing.
Could anything be more enticing?
(Don't answer that.) So it's clear
that the world surrounding us here
and we ourselves are decaying.
That's why I keep hoping and praying
my students will study the past.
We may not have long to last
in this place of labor and sorrow.
It may be all gone tomorrow.
You say that the gods are grumbling.
Must be: the Cosmos is crumbling.
Every day a stone works loose
and plummets right into the sluice.
Just figure it out: every day....
Why'd you move so far away?
Have you gotten frightened of papa?
You trying to be prim and propa?
(Forgive that atrocious rhyme,
but I can't get it right every time.
I'm only a rat after all,
and my brain is a little bit small.)
Aw come on. You're looking befuddled."

My brain was indeed rather muddled.
His talk was so rich in suggestions.
But so many unanswered questions.
And as he squeaked in the gloom
I imagined those greens all in bloom.
I could smell them and see them glisten.
I was almost too frightened to listen
and be drawn by their fatal allure
after ignorant years in the sewer.
I feared that the things I'd be shown
might snuff out all I had known
in my own particular past
if I learned about them too fast
and forgot to maintain my identity
as an independent entity.
What a mind! The way it could roam!
There'd been nothing like this at home
—except maybe Uncle Skinner
(whom mother called an old sinner)
who recited some marvelous fable
whenever he sat at our table.

"You must be afraid to come closer."

"O no...I mean...O no, Sir."
I'd almost begun to revere him,
so how could I mind sitting near him?
I swallowed my doubts and complied
and moved up close to his side.
He seemed to be mightily pleased.

"God knows how I love to be teased;
but this world ... this world's so muddy,
what else gives pleasure but study?
(Don't answer that, don't answer,
you wicked little entrancer.)
Only it—it—(study) recaptures
the Ancients' angelic raptures—
that deeply felt sense of communion,
that profound and mystical union,
without which who can endure
the rigors of life in a sewer?
And they can be endured—and enjoyed—
if one finds a way to avoid
the tiresome useless activities
that stifle one's inner proclivities:
the cut-throat getting and spending,
the train of evils attending:
the backbiting, plotting, conniving...
yeah look at 'em out there striving,
my glorious brothers-in-arms
and their sisters with all their charms...
I know. Old Nick's been a victim.
They thought they'd  try to evict him.
And now they call him a hermit.
However they choose to term it.
But strange little things get brewed
at the depths of my solitude
while they all go paddling around
(It's a wonder they haven't all drowned)
my brothers, uncles, and nephews
out bumping among the refuse.
Old Nick looks pretty inert.
Just poke him; you'll find he's alert.
He naps in his sleeper's den
and revolves things beyond their ken....
And then the mice who've a mind
to leave all that business behind,
imagining they can unravel
the mysteries of life by travel,
looking for God knows what,
mere phantoms as likely as not,
getting lost—O it's all so squalid.
If they'd look for something more solid....
I'm glad you're a mouse who differs
from that crowd of impatient sniffers
out seeking some unknown fragrance—
till they end up classed as vagrants.
The past to them? Dimmest obscurity.
Yet they'd find such a breath-taking purity
if they'd grope in its hidden sources
and sense its original forces
that open the gates of the spirit,
admitting fresh breezes that clear it
and give it miraculous powers
and visions of gardens and flowers
that joyously bloom and unroll
at the depths of a cultured soul.
Just imagine that glorious sight."

I gazed in ecstatic delight.

"So few get to open that door.
so many mice come to my shore.
If I could accommodate more,
I'd certainly do so gladly.
When they go, they go so sadly."

O how had he gotten so wise?
I gazed in his gray little eyes
and observed his whiskers and teeth
with the powerful jawbone beneath
and noted the hair on his paws
and his deft and expressive claws
with devotion, yes, real devotion.
He would show me the inner ocean.
He'd unfold by degrees the mystery
of all past and future history.

He'd lay bare the depths of myself.

Would he let me stay here on his shelf?
O God, how much I'd have rather
had him than my genuine father.
With him the assorted greens,
the spinach, the peas, and the beans,
all hinted at marvelous scenes
where peaceful spirits abide
in a world that was sunlit and wide.
Great vistas arose in my mind
of the past where the soul is enshrined
the soul of mousekind and his heart
in fables of consummate art
that the Ancients' inspired endeavor
had left us to cherish, forever.

How fine it would be to remain
beneath that celestial drain
and develop deep and commanding
powers of understanding,
and teach other mice the way
to that inner more luminous day.
How fine, to flirt with that thought
and to think how much I'd be taught.
(But I never once thought as I flirted
of my envelope lying deserted
in darkness down by the shore.)
I'd learn Nick's mystical lore.
I'd exert my utmost powers
and study for hours and hours.
He'd see that this mouse was no dunce.
I'd apply for enrollment at once.
I'd urge, I'd plead, I'd beg.

Then he put his paw on my leg.

And to think I was almost the pleader.
Forgive me, I blush, dear Reader,
to tell what he tried to do.
You'd be terribly shocked if you knew.
How foul, how shabby, how shoddy:
that rat had designs on my body.

"O Sir," I cried, "Unpaw me,
or you'll wish that you never saw me."

"Aw now..."

                      "Not a word!"

                                                "I was only..."

"I know..."

                     "Do you know how lonely..."

"But I..."

                 "It can be for a rat..."

"Unpaw me!"

                         "Who likes to chat..."

"Now stop!"

                      "Who prefers to discuss..."

"This minute."

                           "Who won't make a fuss..."

"Let me go!"

                      "Who can speak in verse..."

"I'm leaving."

                       "Who likes to converse
with mice who are gifted and clever?"

"And clever?"

                         "Why sure. Why I've never...
if I'm wrong about it, correct me."

"Then Sir, you should try to respect me.
Is this what you do when you're chatting?"

"You refer to this harmless patting,
these innocent recreations,
this communion with deeper sensations
that spirit made flesh requires
to feed its celestial fires?
Our stifling customs forbid it,
but the innocent Ancients did it."

"Are you an Ancient? Tell me
and stop trying to overwhelm me
with all your heady discourses
on secret miraculous forces."

"Well I've only been talking all day
to keep you from going astray
and to tell you the surest way
to develop your body and mind
instead of wandering blind
through sluice after unlighted sluice
till you end with your neck in the noose
of—O all sorts of circumstances—
as you'll find when some she-mouse dances
possessively all around you,
the first she-mouse who's found you,
and you find yourself hunting for food
for an unwashed squeaking brood
of little mouse lassies and laddies
who weren't any fault of their daddy's:
he produced that crowd of mice
while fumbling for paradise."

"I know. You wanted to save me
because you had plans to deprave me...
or eat me! The way you switch
your meanings, it's hard to tell which."

"Yeah it's hard. What I mean is like this:
there's an ultimate cosmic bliss
for which you mice are all striving
and all sorts of ways of arriving
(some slow, some easy and quick—
but the quickest by way of old Nick)
at your ultimate destination:
release from the Curse of Creation.
But regardless what method you name,
the results in the end are the same.
Yet it's strange: many mice seem coy
about seizing this ultimate joy,
though they've looked for nothing else
for as long as they've worn their pelts.
They're choosy about their fashion
of fulfilling their consummate passion.
And they do try the darnedest stunts.
If you'd tried to run, just once....
Without doubt you're the craziest mouse....
You recall my one-time spouse
(God rest her chilly soul).
God knows what impossible goal
she wanted when she was alive....
Here's to you, boy; hope you arrive.
But you'll get there as well right here.
If you'd once understood how near...
just that's what I've hinted at mainly.
But maybe it's time to speak plainly....
But it makes me feel so sad to.
God knows how seldom I've had to.
I never met anyone stranger.
Have you any concept of danger?
Such a shy and innocent one.
If you'd just once tried to run...
but you sat there so fascinated.
It's strange. Things like this must be fated."

"You've told me I'd turn you sour.
I can see that I'm now in your power.
So tell me right now on the spot,
are you going to eat me or not?"

"You use such indelicate terms.
I'm normally nourished by worms
(soft bodiless tails that crawl
from crevices there in my wall).
When you chew them, you find that they're gritty.
(As an image, that's not at all pretty.
Forgive me.) They're all full of dirt.
So I sometimes find for dessert....
I do so admire you males:
the bodies you have on your tails.
There's nothing more shapely or finer;
and I praise the Almighty Designer
who dwells in the Heavens above
for these creatures I tend to and love."

"Is that love, do you say, to devour
the creatures you get in your power?
No wonder they turn you sour!
No wonder I kept at a distance.
You were menacing my existence!
Can't we find a thing we admire,
a thing that excites our desire,
without secretly trying to destroy it?
Can't we find a way to enjoy it
that allows it still to exist?
We can't? Is that the gist
of your long and elaborate greeting?
That love is nothing but eating?
How horrible! You're dooming
all life to vile consuming!
Then all your inspiring images
were nothing but plays and scrimmages
in a nasty repulsive game,
in an—O it's too horrid to name!
In a scholar so prim and fastidious—
it's too shocking, too sordid, too hideous!"

"You want to go? Well alright."

"All right!"

                    "Yeah old Nick doesn't bite,
unless someone wants to be bitten."

"But..."

              "I'm not that foolishly smitten."

"But..."

             "I'm not an outrageous sinner.
There's lots who...I've plenty for dinner...
that is, counting the worms."

                                                   "But Sir, you..."

"You can go. Old Nick won't deter you."

"But Sir, I..."

                      "Don't gaze so quizzically.
It almost affects me physically.
If you're going, you'd...but you grieve me
by wanting so quickly to leave me,
miscast in my strange occupation."

"Your students..."

                                "They're all on vacation."

"They'll be back?"

                                 "O yeah, there's plenty.
Some months fifteen or twenty.
I can't always tell 'em apart;
but I love 'em with all my heart.
And yet, for all their applause,
it's depressing. They slip through my paws.
The best ones. They lack the maturity
to grasp that ultimate purity....
If you're going, boy, better get going.
The sluice is right there, still flowing.
Jump in quick and get it about you
before it flows on without you."

"I'll find my envelope."

"Your what? It's alive, I hope."

"She's here in the near vicinity."

"Good Heavens, he's lost his virginity.
He's got a fe-...he's eloped
and got himself enveloped.
I knew there was something queer....
You just get her right out of here!
The way he soaked up my palaver....
Get her out! Right away! I won't have her!
I'll attack, I'll evict, I'll impeach her.
I'm a well-known respectable teacher."

"But she's not..."

                              "I don't care."

                                                       "She's my vessel..."

"What names! God knows what a mess'll
result from a business like this.
Where'd you leave this coy little miss?
You know, she'll soon make you rue her
and drawn yourself in the sewer.
She'll claim you attempted to rape her."

"But it's made of wax-coated paper."

"Made of....Good Heavens. But how...?
I'm sure I've heard everything now.
The creature's constructed a manikin
that he does something vile and satanic in."

"It's a ship, a vessel, a boat,
my means of staying afloat;
and the reason I call it a she
is—well—she's been good to me."

"That's a pretty perverted reason."

"It comes open. I slide my knees in..."

"Now stop this, boy. It's atrocious.
It's making me downright ferocious....
A boat?...I've heard of such things.
In one old tale someone sings....
But I hear a worm in the wall.
They've a queer little plaintive call.
I've never known worms to refuse me.
Dear Sir, I hope you'll excuse me.
You're leaving, right now I assume?"

And he left me alone in the gloom.
I walked slowly down to the shore
and found her there as before
(my craft, my secret desire)
except that now she was drier,
and prepared again to embark
out into that turbulent dark.
I grasped a corner and brought her
down to the viscous water
and got in. It was easily done.

But ah, what of daylight and sun?
Would I find them out there before me
where all seemed dark and stormy?
And after what wounds, what scars?...
And what of the moon and the stars?

PART TWO
THE MARRIAGE OF A MOUSE
BOOK III

O aid me, ye Muses of Story,
in this, my passage to glory,
which proves that though doomed to a sewer
mousekind shall not only endure
but shall, said Faulkner, prevail,
and tells how, helped by his tail,
one mouse of great valor braves
those Hell-dark, foul-smelling waves
and at last in his envelope steers
up among the Heavenly Spheres.

O aid me,
ye Sisters, evade me
not,
for now with my plot
getting thicker
and with my maturing age
more smutty on every page,
this story's got
to move quicker.

Fly in from your Ocean Isles
out in clear ethereal blue;
revive me with giggles and smiles,
and help me with rhyming too;
protect me from errors
and blunders
as I sail through these terrors
and wonders,
and preserve my powers undiminished
until this moustrosity's finished.

Say first, for your Heavenly View
dives deep into sluice and slue,
say first, O Heavenly Viewer,
did the mouse you see in that sewer
leave that rat's most foul and unhallowed
retreat without being followed?
And did (lacking sail and mast)
that rodent reach daylight at last?
(O tell me, good Muses, O tell me!
Or did those waves overwhelm me?)

"Nick's light slid slowly aft
and away from the trim little craft,
towered high, then faded away
into depths that swallowed all day,
but the rat remained in his hole;
and the mouse, sore troubled of soul,
squeaked bravely aloud, to forget
his fear, his shame—his regret.

"Then out in the cataract's roar,
uncomfortably close to the shore
as he sculled out among great rocks,
a can banged into a box;
he heard the crash and boom
reverberate deep in the gloom
and cried, 'O dripping dungeon,
that again I must rise and plunge in
and travel through, dizzy and blind!...'

"But escape lay in keeping confined:
confined to his white paper pocket
that rolled like an eye in a socket
still keeping its wakeful stare,
with the mouse as its iris of hair:
an eye: an island of seeing
in the fleshy tumult of Being
that scarcely could stay in its place
in the folds of that Watery Face
and that wearied yet dared never doze,
lest those great muddy eyelids close."

(If I let those waves even blink me,
I knew they would swamp and sink me.)

That sluice. How I longed to slip by it
in moss-hung studious quiet,
removed from its whirl of sensation
in untouched contemplation.
Was that noisy chaotic commotion
the only way to the ocean?
That darkness? I pictured the tunnel's
great waves coming, over the gunnels:
O I'd go where their turbulence led me;
but the me would soon be a dead me.

But suppose I clung to the wall,
moved more slowly....

                                       I wouldn't at all.
I'd just sit there, going to rot in
the darkness, forsaken, forgotten,
till I got so warped and constricted,
I acted as queerly as Nick did.

I pictured that humdrum solidity...
then again the water's fluidity
and reckless drunken upheavals:
was I doomed to one of these evils?
Had logic that seemed unimpeachable
proved oceans forever unreachable?

Or was there a way in between...
where the water was swift, yet serene,
where force had neutralized force
in a narrow but steerable course
that led through this world of tensions
out into other dimensions?
There seemed to be something....Before,
when I steered to Nick's dim shore,
when, cruelly tumbled and tossed,
my life had seemed hopelessly lost
and I looked death right in the face...
and as if by some mystical grace,
Nick's light, Nick's beckoning spark,
came flickering out of the dark
and began then hugely to loom
like a ghost from the depths of a tomb,
and I thought I might really be drowned
and heard in the dark all around
what seemed like a Heavenly psalm
and the waters...the waters grew calm!
Light flashed in my understanding.
Calm as I came near the landing!
Was that the cataract's riddle?
Between its shore and its middle
did a quietly burbling way
lead out to the light of day—
through galleries, tunnels, and caves
like a thread to the sunlit waves—
round pillar and post and plinth
out of that labyrinth?
I'd have only to feel out and mark
its....

        How could I when all had gone dark?
O sly metaphorical thread,
how could I see where you led?
By the second it kept getting darker,
and there wasn't a sign of a marker.
I despaired. I let out a squeak—
for again my future looked bleak,
looked empty, O blacker than black.

Then from nowhere—a squeak came back,
as if I'd been somehow admonished.
I looked around me astonished.
All silent. I squeaked once more,
and back from that empty shore
through the slowly deepening shade,
altered and slightly delayed,
again the echo returned;
and in that delay I discerned
a distance...the distance my call
had been from the echoing wall!
In the dark—the accurate range!
I could sense it—wasn't it strange?
One of Nature's fathomless laws.
I gazed down at the tunnel's dark jaws....
Let others let sewers gobble 'em.
This mouse had solved his problem.
I would find the sea I was seeking
by the sound of my musical squeaking.

O my boat had a tail to steer it,
      enskiffed
      adrift
      on the tide;
but blundering flesh needed Spirit:
squeak on, melodious guide!

Envelope mated with tail;
      and whither
      they slither
      along,
whither they snugly sail,
the fruit of their mating's a song.

Thus Yin once mated with Yang
      (As told
      by the old
      Chinese),
and the whole world thenceward sprang
in a thunderous Cosmic Sneeze.

There deep in the gurgling chasm
      of Yin
      (For within
      was Yang)
there stirred in a mighty spasm
the world, like a song that they sang.

This world. This Valley of Death
alive with my vibrating breath.

O masonried tube of doom,
can a mouse escape you
by squeaking tunes in your gloom?
By learning to shape you
to meaning, form, and relation?
O these are the joys of creation!

Squeak on, ye squeaks, O squeak!
At last I'd learned to rejoice
in the sound of my own small voice.
A voice...was it one voice only?
How lonely
that sounded, how bleak.
For where would my singing belong?
Would my only fruit be a song?
Had I in my rage to exist
turned into a solipsist—
uprooted, banished, exiled?

I'd been such a lonely child.
I'd always avoided my neighbors'
laughter, joking, and labors.
I'd creep up into our drain
and squeak some soulful refrain
whose haunting and sad repetition
seemed to speak of our mortal condition.
O loneliness—how it condenses,
refracts, through the lens of senses
unsmudged by the world's vulgarity,
all life to its ultimate clarity.

Then what could I feel? I could feel
my hind-paws wedged in the keel,
my scalp turning under the flap,
one forepaw down in my lap,
the other paw poised on the rail,
and deep in the stern my tail
that faithfully steered and sculled....

Yet my senses seemed strangely dulled.
How faded things seemed to have grown.
Here I was peaceful, alone,
all calm, the boat not leaking...
O to have heard someone squeaking!
Anyone. Mouse or....What was it?
When the mind's mirror clouds, what does it?
Alone. Was it simply my fright
as I drifted away from the light
that had old Nick as its keeper?
Or was it something deeper?

And now that light had vanished
to me, whom Nick had banished....
If it hadn't been for my scruples,
I might have been one of his pupils,
one of his chosen anointed.
Was that it?...Disappointed?
Goodness, I wondered, of what?
Had I wanted to stay there or not?
Stay there and be deflowered
and little by little devoured.
If I'd tried to root there and settle,
he'd have plucked me, petal by petal,
and cast me away, condemned,
when at last I was empty-stemmed,
when at last (to be less high-flown)
I was nothing but gristle and bone...
and then he'd have gnawed off the gristle
and picked me as clean as a whistle.

I pictured the sight and shivered.
Thank God that I'd been delivered,
that I'd boldly taken my chances
and countered his deadly advances
with such a despairing aplomb
that he'd turned from me, overcome,
and let me depart as I pleased.

If I'd tried to run, he'd have seized
me at once, and excited from chasing me,
done things he couldn't do facing me.
Magnificent moral precocity
prevented that dreadful atrocity.
Moral courage had made me victorious.
Could anything be more glorious?

And yet—that I'd shown such bravery
outfacing his noxious knavery,
that Nick's educational shelf
had revealed such a force in myself—
was that enough to explain
why maybe I'd wished to remain?
O who can fathom my actions
and the nature of Nick's attractions?
O Gide, O Freud, O Proust!
Was I itching to be seduced?

Did I long for something so awful?

I wept, shedding tears by the pawful.
They trickled down over my coat;
they dripped in the bilge of the boat;
but the verdict seemed inescapable:
I wished that I'd proved more rapable.

But what did that mean—seduction?
Did it always lead to destruction?
It meant that he'd found something sweet in me.
What made me think held have eaten me?
Was it he or I who was treating
love as a lust, like eating,
as something that overpowers
and, perhaps out of fear, devours?
Was he really the savage aggressor
or only a kindly professor?

Some students ran, and he followed them,
caught them—and probably swallowed them...
dull fellows who, though they'd boated
that far, weren't really devoted
and got destroyed by his system
when they tried to flee or resist him.
Did he lecture them, bore them, induce
them to flee, so he'd have an excuse
to attack them?...Then all his discourses
on secret miraculous forces
were only a trap that he'd baited....

But I'd sat fascinated,
till at last, completely nonplussed
by my fervor, brilliance, trust,
Nick opened his inner sanctum.
I should have been grateful and thanked him
instead of recoiling in fright.

In that dim and ghostly light,
his proposal had shocked and alarmed me,
but really—would it have harmed me?
Would it have damaged my health?
To take one's pleasure by stealth
regardless of stuffy morality
can steady the whole personality.
Here I wept tears by the sluiceful.
The experience might have been useful,
might have affected me tonically....

O why did I act so moronically?

And he let me go so easily....
I felt so small, so measly....
Dear old Nick, I just couldn't cotton
to him....I sensed he was rotten.
Yet he seemed so alive, so flourishing.
Like spinach: rotten but nourishing.

He was like the food I'd rejected
at home. "He's afraid it's infected."
My brother's words when he taunted me
came back to me now and haunted me:
"Afraid!"...It was rancid and soured!
Afraid: me, a finicky coward
who shrunk from the world around me....
My God, but it just about drowned me!
This world with those greens and Old Nick in it—
Did I think I could only get sick in it?
Did I think this sewer would poison me
if I let it stir any joys in me?

This sewer—was it really a sewer?
Or did it have an allure
that I, in a quest for the pure
that made this world seem rotten,
had never known—or forgotten?
As a sewer I've seen and presented it—
but what if I've only invented it?
Invented it out of my fears
and watered it now with my tears?
O what if this gurgling night
that holds no joy, no delight,
this bottomless pestilent hole,
is an image of my own soul?

O theory, proposal, rebuttal.
O that rat. He'd made me too subtle.

He'd made it all so confusing.
And here I was, aimlessly cruising
—where? Over waves. Did they flow where
I hoped? No, no, they went nowhere—
ever sinking away as I followed
until at last they were swallowed
in ultimate darkness below
with me borne along in the flow
through these terrors that lurked in between.

That ocean: what did it mean?
All dark. No color, no pigment,
affirmed it more than the figment
of one mouse's sickened mentality
losing its grip on reality.
Nothing. Vacuity.  Suction,
sucking me down to destruction.
And what was this nil, this void,
by which I was being destroyed,
this bright, transcendental goal?
The void was in my own soul,
an idle and empty longing
in one who had failed in belonging
in sewer-life where he was born.

O my feelings—how they were torn.

So I sailed, feeling every variety
of doubt, despair, anxiety,
while muffled reverberations
trembled the world's foundations,
and sometimes a starry light
would drift above through the night
as I sensed my path by my squeaks—
was it hours, days—was it weeks?—
with nothing on which to brood
but my empty solitude
and nothing to do but eat—
yes I ate—the tainted meat,
the spinach, the peas, and the beans,
the black, dead-smelling, greens
that Nick couldn't see as a proof
of a world up above our roof—
a sunlit, illusory world
where no stale waters swirled
and the odors were fresh and sweet.
Yes I ate. I had to eat.
It became a lustful compulsion
that snuffed out all the revulsion
I'd felt when I had been younger.
I'd never known such hunger,
such emptiness, such craving,
such a pitiless, helpless, depraving
crying inside me....

                                  Strange:
was my body beginning to change?

I'd land on the shore, try to sleep.
When I could, it was seldom deep
and I dreamed....I'd a dream of my sister
in which I fondled and kissed her
and...Reader, I can't go on.
It's a well-known phenomenon:
sleep's version of rainy weather.
Then I thought of our childhood together—
how I'd realized what made her a daughter
one evening late, when I caught her...
O Reader, spare me the scene.
I'm sure you can guess what I mean.
Then how troubled, how strangely distressed
I'd been when she'd stroll through the nest
and I'd think: That creature's a "her"—
and with nothing on but her fur.
How oddly her body swung,
and her belly: the way it hung:
such elegance, such design,
yet somehow so different from mine.
And yet, right along with me, she's
a member of our own species
and even of our own family,
I'd think—absurdly and hamily:
Imagine being perplexed
by a mouse just differently sexed.

Or then again back in the boat
I'd think, as I'd leisurely float:
But what's inside of a female?
Take mother....

                          An itch in my tail
distracted me. Itches, itches,
I fumed. Am I hexed by witches,
drab Mollys with dirty digits
who give me these hungers and fidgets?
am I sick? Am I dying of cancer?
Then I suddenly realized the answer:

Be it fiancee, mistress, or spouse,
I needed a female mouse.

Then I'd land again and camp
alone in the starless damp:
O a female with whom I could bunnel
by the shore of the murmuring tunnel.
Some Circe, some Pocahontas....
Did they need us, those creatures, or want us
as we wanted them, I wondered?
But the cataract only thundered....

Then it spoke to me: "That's what you miss
by wandering off like this,
you hairy pioneer, you.
Squeak, squeak! Who's here to hear you?
Me? Then expound your notion
that I flow out to an ocean.
Me? I'm only a phantasm.
Many a lunatic has 'em."
—And the voice vanished into the night.

O for a ray of light!
For a gleam, a glimmer, a spark!

But I woke once again in the dark.
Or was I still half sleeping?
I heard a sound....It was weeping.
It couldn't...the sound a mouse makes.
(The squeaking quivers and shakes.)
More spirits, I thought. This coast's
infested with gibbering ghosts....

"Can't they ever leave me alone?"

I crouched there, still as a stone.

"Can't they once just let me be?
Can't a girl mouse ever be free?
They'll drive me out of my mind
with the way they keep me confined
in that nest—that hole in the wall.
And they never clean it at all.
Heaped up with trash and litter.
And she just sits. I could hit her.
And he's as much to be blamed.
It makes me feel so ashamed.
Can't they see I've got to get out?
'It won't do no good to pout,
young lady.' It won't...O fooey
on them. They're warped. They're screwy.
Won't let me swim or run
or dance. It's wrong to have fun,
it's wrong if I go for a walk,
I suppose, and stop to talk
even, with young male mice.
It's not supposed to be nice
unless he offers his tail.
As if I was up for sale—
or tails on a male were diseased."

Here, for some reason, I sneezed.
A stupid ridiculous lapse.
The damp—or a draft perhaps...
or the light. That light outlining
her figure. From where was it shining?

Her voice—it was toneless, dreamy—
stopped. She'd turn. She'd see me.
She'd see that a mouse was listening.

She turned, her front teeth glistening,
both of them, there in the glow,
and said very calmly,

                                       "Hello."

How enchantingly simple it sounded.
I stared. You'd think me astounded
to hear that a mouse could speak;
and I suddenly felt so weak:
I could feel my blood as it pumped
through my body, sitting there humped
in a ball (to look like a stone).

"You're here...completely alone?"

She sat there without a word.
I went on, feeling slightly absurd:
"Alone? And you've...been crying?
I've...I didn't mean to be spying."

"It's not....O they just make me mad,
that's all."

                  "Who?"

                                  "Them."

                                                  "That's bad."

"It's not that I'm flitty or gaddy."

"I can see that."

                             "But Mummy and Daddy....
O you won't understand."

                                              "I can try."

She sniffled, heaved a sigh,
and mechanically scratched her ear.
I sat down beside her, as near
as I dared.

                   "If you told me about it,"
(I felt for her paw) "no doubt it
would help....You should try....Just a little...."

"...I...can't...."

                        "O come now. It'll
surprise you, I think, how good
you'll feel....If you once understood
how the forces you've long been repressing
are freed by boldly confessing...."

She seemed to be lost in a trance.
Good God, I thought, what a chance.
A genuine female mouse.
I observed her closely. A louse
crept out on a breast's little hummock,
jumped down to her lower stomach,
and vanished under her hair.
O the life that went on in there....

"You should try. When we say what we're feeling,
it's often strangely revealing...."

Then how to begin? A massive
assault on a creature so passive
might really succeed. O it had to!
But it made me feel like a cad to.
A devil. A gray little Lucifer.
Such calculating use of her:
to lay my trap, put the bait in—
a four-pawed, whiskery Satan,
whose brain, though it looked rather meager,
was that of a monstrous intriguer,
a ruthless Machiavelli.
I gazed at her downy belly....

"Try now. The things that we're seeking
come clear often, merely by speaking...."

Something cried in me, O, something needed
those touching things that a she did!

"If you can't unload your trouble,
you know, it burdens you double."

I squeezed her paw. Not a word
would she utter. Heavens, I'd heard
her before: she'd wept out a bale of it—
though I couldn't make head nor tail of it.
Was she hiding some secret shame?
Goody.

              "Perhaps you've a name,"
I said, "Mice do, I believe."

"My name...it's Genevieve."

"And the nickname?"

                                       "I haven't any.
Well...mostly they call me Jenny....
There now, I've told you a little."

Good Lord, she was noncommittal.
I'd asked her name with design,
as a hint she should ask me for mine,
for, Reader, isn't it shameless
that after two books I'm nameless?
But she sat there in silence, ignoring me.
Did it strike her she might be boring me,
the nasty little nonentity?

"You haven't asked my identity,"
I said to her finally, furious
that mice can be so incurious.

"I s'pose you're one of the villagers
or...one of those wandering pillagers."
I could see in the growing light
her eyes open wide in fright.

"Pillagers? No. But I wander...."
Should I tell? Would my thoughts be beyond her?
Good Heavens, I had to be bolder.
What harm could it do if I told her?
I might sound like a dashing fellow—
a sort of pint-sized Othello
whose tale, in a warlike