Time-Lapse Photography: A Mouse Corpse Devoured by Maggots

At first, the grave familiar scene:

a mouse lies among stones and weeds

like a painter's subject

in a tiny landscape of ruin.

This, we say, this is what

we know of death:

arrest of motion, frigidity,

bleak consummation

of life's fling and jig.

Death, we know, holds still.

But then the mouse's body

swells, flexes, rolls,

seems almost to dance in place.

Supermouse muscles bunch

beneath its coat,

rippling its flanks

like the waves of an earthquake

approaching and departing:

maggots, en masse, migrating

from organ to organ,

feed to feed.

Meanwhile

its claws tap rhythm on the ground.

It even shakes its mousy booty-

Then, as if spent

in convulsions

of laughter or grief,

it slumps in on itself,

collapsing, matted fur

parting, small bones erupting

from the carrion,

and implodes at last,

flat smear of darkness

in the stricken field,

While its soul, transformed,

now voiced and winged,

ascends, a cloud of thick black flies

that sport and hiss

on the stinking air

and innocent as fresh angels

carry the dance away.

Structure

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