LIKE FIELD MICE

They are leaving like field mice, snatched, mid-meadow
running under the moon. No shadow of raptor's wings, no click
of waxy talons to warn before the girls are seized in their beds or
plucked from the sidewalk in front of the mini-mart. Sweet
as wild bunnies, they've never imagined their parents finding
a piece of fluff on barbed wire or torn backpack in high grass.
They are the little soft ones, the babies. The older ones are sleeping
by an open window or walking home, tipsy, bellies and throats
opened to the dark, to the lone coyote or rangy pack. Maybe an SUV
passes and then turns back. Maybe they are grabbed off the curb
as a shoe slips, as their head turns toward a black dress in a window.
Someone finds a purse the next day, three lipsticks melting in the sun.
Dogs find a bit of fur stuck to a tail light, a smear on a back seat.
They are stolen while we are watching HBO. They are rendered
still while we are showering with lavender and geranium. Waiting
to be found in wetlands near I-95, some are never found. They
become part of a field or a lake or a new basement wall. They
disappear when we are at the shore, on vacation from the news
and salaried lives, like a shell we walked by, sea hash, a whelk rolling
in the surf. Not all of them are gone. Some fight back, chew through
tape, break free of jaws and rank caves, return, crawl to a stranger's
back door , collapse on cement steps with seeping neck wounds,
burned wrists. I know. We fix them up and they wear blue suits
to work or get a new doll for Christmas. No one knows why they
cannot cross an open field in the dark, let a stranger shake their hand
too long, relax in sleeping bags under a shower of stars.

- from Various Modes of Departure, Kore Press, 2004

By, Deborah Fries