Neotoma albigula
Western white-throated woodrat
Charles Alexander
what do you carry
and are you fast
enough to disappear
with your belongings
what do you sing
and does your voice
throw open notes
into a dark room
can you spare a moment
to walk in the desert,
will you be silent
can we just watch
each other come to
terms with the light
whose west this is
whose white this is
in the throat of
woods in the throes
of words, rat tat tat
on wood I do not
know, amid the middens
we share an attic
or room enough to breathe
within pinched spaces within
a cloud that consumes us
new books, paper domes written
always by artificial light
always bejeweled light
prancing toward white pages
and western spaces burned
white-hot and choke-throat
blackened wood fragments
scatter the birds scatter
the rats the insects the
leaves we all depend on
in the books we write
by decreasing light in the
words that threaten more
in the semper fidelis maniacal
charge of untended fields
tomes and domes, open and
closed in the untended fields
the white-throated woodrat utters
a cry in fear and we hear and
progress belongs to history which
goes the way of the unwanted
rat in the maze or the
dying light the eye-trembling
lack of light we can neither
read nor eat in the death
books with their black pages
we consume but do not stand
under green leaves or blue skies
but crawl with those under siege
those under the breathing room
in the sinking western sun
the wood rat waits for us
all to be gone, the survivor
in all of us waits, too
we might be wood rats, moving
scavenging, watching, waiting
we might be alive in the middens
we might be breathing in the room
~~~~~
Charles Alexander is a poet, book artist, editor, and Executive Director of Chax Press. His books of poems include Certain Slants (Junction Press, 2007) and near or random acts (Singing Horse Press, 2004).