Explaining It

In the woods off Ivory, just out of car-shot it’s not enough to say a mouse lies snug in a crib of roots, its fur sleek as babyskin, Lord the body warm. Too often a name subverts the pang it answers for, inwit of heart-light, the epiphanic clutch. I mean do you sense with more than a chill the tiny homely lumpliness of it there in the dirt as you orphan the dim of a cold October sun, no wound I can find anywhere on its, your, my small soft bodykins—yikes its left ear (the inner skin pink delicate svelte) twitches a little and I have this before thought tricks it whimsically lovely wink of the soul as mouse-force taking wing until the O-no letdown when a yellow jacket backs out, O sweetmeat funk and dandle of the brain asputter as it launches over frost-curled leaves and dollarweed seed strewn on the path like medallions glimpsed the second we— I mean all of us cold in the twilight—fly.