The Pendulum

The mice are sheltering in place

in our walls. I know that now

because of the nights I can’t sleep,

stewing over the news, my body

vibrating with a phantom pain

of the thousands intubated, suffocating.

I heard their rapid-heart skittering

like an infection in the house before

we saw one walking almost calmly

across the table, and set a trap

under the hutch. Last night, I thought

I’d never calm my mind, with best

estimates of global deaths reaching

two million, trying to enter a dream

felt like swinging a pendulum into

a shallow, teeming puddle. Then

I heard it—someone shuffling around

downstairs, walking across the kitchen.

Had the future entered already,

with food shortages so steep,

people will break into houses just to eat?

But no, it was just the mouse, jolting

the black plastic trap across the floor,

its desperate hefts resembling

the slow steps of a man. We sat up

in bed, hearts beating fast at the way

anything alive will do anything

to keep living. That’s why we say

the mouse is in the man, the scientist

said on the radio this morning,

referring to the tests they’re doing,

injecting their twitching torsos

with every suspected antibody,

to develop a working vaccine.

She explained that mice are a lot like us,

biologically, but we could have guessed

that as it went on trying to throw itself

from the trap, and we, powerful and

cowardly, sat, not unmoved but unmoving,

before its suffering.