Winter came, driving the mice back in The woods house. They set traps — And he dreamed every night after that he’d be awakened By the killing arm’s flat snap, Impossibly loud in the dark, until he awoke. They caught the first one while they were Screwing. He heard, and Reached for the light. It was a bad near miss. Fur, Blood, stickpin eyes — and alive, burdened Top-heavy with the trap. They got smokes And walked unclothed around the house with things To spring the traps. He was shaken Each time, and tried not to show how he jumped when the springs Went. Then he put the hurt mouse in a sack and, Swinging it against the porch, broke Its spine. That bugged her, but her mood Changed thinking how scared he’d been, and she laughed her Old laugh later, untouching in the big bed. They screwed Sometime before dawn. They forgot rent, and the month after Forgot again on purpose; May came; When it thawed the mice went out and aired Themselves on the porch. It was spring, And his feeling that neither of them were quite there, In a house that’d vanished out of reckoning, Was always the same. All that summer and fall they wandered In the circling hills — the strange freedom of the forsaken, She called it, summer-lovely and fonder of Obscurity than he, who held his shaken Self to earth by repeating like a mantra I love her, oh at least I love her — Though if you’d asked, it would have taken Him a full minute to remember her name.