"Enjoyment" by Matt Dennison

Enjoyment

I enjoyed sleeping on the floor
near the old gas heater and hearing
the rat trap snap and flip under
the far kitchen sink, but I did not enjoy
waking to the eyeless rat curled in a fat,
panting ball in the old shag carpet between
my face and the heat and who scurried away
through rat touch and bump when I moved.

And I did not enjoy losing my keys
that night, though the barn cat enjoyed
our holding each other as I circled the house
looking through different windows at the same rat,
thinking: cat, rat… cat, rat… before we slept
in the old farm truck while listening to hillbilly
gospel on the a.m. radio.

But I did enjoy catching the sleepy
blind rat the next morning in a brown paper bag
and flinging him into the woods behind the house
knowing he would escape into infinite rat blackness—
or at least feed a hungry owl or cat—until the bag
landed high in a tree and hung there, growing
heavier and colder, heavier and colder all winter.

Finnegan Flawnt, Jan 08

great piece. at times, this has the tone of a poem for children, with its repetitions and animals, and the end is so imaginative and somehow known - to anyone who likes to throw things at least (like me). not rats, of course. at least not every day.

Susan Gibb, Jan 08

I love the images here, "eyeless rat curled in a fat, panting ball" for example.

Read this first as itself, then again in my own interpretation of it as a metaphor for all the flaws or ghosts or regrets that we have that we'd like to forget. Yet they hang there "growing heavier and colder" into our "winter" years.

Very nice work.