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  • You Wonder, and: The New Mousetrap
  • Robert Wrigley (bio)

You Wonder

The gut-shot coyote manages to risefrom the coil of its agony and lapa bit from the birdbath, before it dies.Meanwhile the morning coffee brews and drips,

bacon, toast, and a pair of shirred eggs chill.By the time the newspaper’s been read,I go outside and find it there still,of course, and drag it away, stiff and dead,

by a surprisingly tiny hind paw,up the path to a skidder trail and downinto the gully from which its kind howlsalmost every night. Let its rictus frown

serve as warning: someone’s a lousy shot.Or else, alternatively, someone’s not. [End Page 222]

The New Mousetrap

Whether it is better, I cannot say:a hammer, a platform, a catch, a spring,the spring, the winter, the summer, the fall,they all, every season, for the reasonof food and shelter, somehow come inside,despite the cat, despite the batts of steel woolin every oubliette and fissure jammed—

and just now, no more than five steps awayfrom the pantry door, I hear the new trap slamand return to find not one mouse, but two—cute, almost adorable gray vermininstantly killed there—so perhaps, at last,the great goad of industry has attainedthat acme long sought, the epitome

of me, or you, or us against them—harborers of hantavirus, leaversto us of the commas of their black curds,as these vanquished two after death still do,though they quiver not, nor in the least waygive they any other sign of life,which endeth, if more slowly, for us all. [End Page 223]

Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley teaches at the University of Idaho. Bloodaxe Books (UK) will publish his The Church of Omnivorous Light, in March 2013; his long-time US publisher, Penguin, will publish Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems, in April. He lives in the woods near Moscow, Idaho, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.

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