This, Lord, was an anxious brother and
a living diagram of fear: full of health himself,
             he brought diseases like a gift
to give his hosts. Masked in a cat’s moustache
         but sounding like a bird, he was a ghost
               of lesser noises and a kitchen pest
        for whom some ladies stand on chairs. So,
  Lord, accept our felt though minor guilt
       for an ignoble foe and ancient sin:
                  the murder of a guest
   who shared our board: just once he ate
           too slowly, dying in our trap
  from necessary hunger and a broken back.

Humors of love aside, the mousetrap was our own
     opinion of the mouse, but for the mouse
             it was the tree of knowledge with
           its consequential fruit, the true cross
          and the gate of hell. Even to approach
               it makes him like or better than
    its maker: his courage as a spoiler never once
  impressed us, but to go out cautiously at night,
    into the dining room;—what bravery, what
          hunger! Younger by far, in dying he
  was older than us all: his mobile tail and nose
  spasmed in the pinch of our annoyance. Why,
then, at that snapping sound, did we, victorious,
             begin to laugh without delight?

             Our stomachs, deep in an analysis
                      of their own stolen baits
(and asking, “Lord, Host, to whom are we the pests?”),
            contracted and demanded a retreat
         from our machine and its effect of death,
            as if the mouse’s fingers, skinnier
        than hairpins and as breakable as cheese,
           could grasp our grasping lives, and in
     their drowning movement pull us under too,
    into the common death beyond the mousetrap.