BAITING BUSH RATS

Native. Marsupial: six syllables suggesting an indigenous tenderness,

though, because they dwell in limited light, unseen,

they are given the names of vermin: rat, rodent, and their reputation

for disease and filth. They come for shelter, entering

the ceiling through cracks in the wall age or creepers have widened.

The air they exhale is blue, also the hair-thin stripes

of light that number the outstanding veins in their ears. Their tails-

rolled, banded leather-make curious lines in a sheen

of torchlit timber dust. Their nests are spiked with straw, paper, wood-

splinters and hair, and could be the careful makings

of any small bird. When they move along a narrow network of rafters,

it seems a spray of fine gravel has been cast into

the roof; or an internal, gritty rain interrupting sleep or thought.

It's simple: disturb domestic order and die. So a list

of death is made, narrowed to traps or cups of poison. You rarely hear

the traps go off- (branches at the window, the neck

bone crack of expanding joinery) -but the cries of poisoned animals

claim the walls like rising damp. With brutal thirst,

they turn in circles and rake each other's eyes, their pain forgotten

until morning, when they are sometimes found,

bobbing like unhealthy turds in water that's impossible to flush.