Niall Campbell
Mouse
There’s not much room in literature for the mouse;
though, door flung open, sometimes it creeps in,
like Dickinson when she says, Grief is a Mouse—
and it sits there by her sleeve, a few inches
of shyness, brown furred, desolate as a grass stem.
Of course, Burns gifted his own mouse a field
just as it was cropped, scythed, bound. The grain folded
into sheathes. Mouse, it did not gain much;
and you can see it darting, in the end,
to the snow-like wild fringes of the margin.
Rats, though. Rats are everywhere in books.
They chew through Hamelin, and in Camus’s The Plague
they’re set like death’s black letters on the house-steps.
Heaney has them run across the ponds,
Christs of the sewer-pipe, itching for trespass.
Not so the mouse. Now, reading, I look to turn
the page and startle him, twitching and gnawing
the print line, the grained lettering. A symbol
of quiet, soft, dignified life: the rare
and seldom. Startled, startling—then gone.
Niall Campbell is a Scottish poet. He was a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2014. His most recent collection is Noctuary (Bloodaxe, 2019).