Apology

All day they lay in the sun, on the snowbank,

their bodies mid-leap

from the shock of neck-break,

the troop of them looked like a pattern repeat

on a baby-crib sheet—

five mice, a’ dancin’—

and when it was dusk I threw up the sash

and pried the backup suet, the frozen

pork fatback

out of the feeder,

replacing it with a fresh lard block.

Then I took the dish of pig meat out

the door, and scooped up the stopped mice,

and hurried slowly, on the bone-meal rubble of my

pre-op hip, through the drifts to the woods. Dead

hemlock branches, stump-shards, stones

seeming to move, I balanced the mice

in a blanket of pig till I came to the porcupine

log and threw the mammal remains

beyond it. And my fear of the dark

came down with the night, 10 above zero going

maybe to 10 below. Venus

shone me home above the house, I

ran cold water over my hands, it felt

warm. I kill animals. I have

done it all my life—though I did not

sense my mother’s larder of eggs through her

walls or want to suck them, though I had

sent one down to hunt a sperm for me.

Dear Reader, when you return to your home

have I been there sometimes, while you have been gone, do you

find my offerings on your doorstep,

their tails in curves, their paws up,

in astonish to be there—

my father’s father, my mother’s mother’s

mother, and her daughter, and her daughter,

and her daughter, and her daughter?