I’ve been sulking around the house
wringing my hands inside my chest
like some old weatherman
certain the big storm’s coming today,
the one that’ll blow us all away
with whatever wrath you believe in.
If you ask me how I am, I’ll tell you
my recent life’s story, which is ridiculous.
Yesterday, for instance, I found a dead mole
in the driveway. Nice job, cat, I thought, then
remembered the star-nosed mole I caught
years ago. I put the mole in the plastic aquarium
I’d used to kill a Siamese fighting fish.
I gave the mole grass and leaves, some twigs
and watched him for two days. I named him
Frightful. I never saw him move,
except his little ribs heaving like a coal miner’s.
I pressed my face to the plastic, staring
into those mineshaft eyes. I was sure
he was scared of me, but I don’t remember
if I felt like God or like I thought God might feel.
I remember the body, though,
after I’d stared him to death,
how it bounced in the grass on the third day.
I remembered yesterday when I flicked that mole
with my shoe’s tip into the road, the traffic
like a life’s-full of guilt. What I carry
in my chest is never of my choosing,
so the stories I tell are always the same,
why my prayers keep begging for words
to let me rewrite my own endings, or
at least imagine the possibility, a sunrise
on the horizon I can’t see in the dark.