The Red Line

 

Since you left I have spent days gazing through glass

at the blazing Japanese maple, at the sparrows in the beech,

at the squirrels in the feeder foraging for nuts.

 

Come sundown, the rat ambles up, fat and slow, doesn’t flinch

when I knock to scare him off.  He lives under the deck. I’ve tried

baffles and traps, ammonia spray and high-pitched ultrasonic waves.

 

He always returns, like the song I loathe and can’t stop hearing—

the one about the serial killer, the one I asked you to stop playing.

You’d make grotesque gestures instead of dance, mouth words

 

instead of sing. I teased you about your sublimated rage and your fetish

for violent death. We never fought but used compromise like a weapon.

You shaved your beard. I dyed my gray hair. You quit inside smoking.

 

I cut drinking to weekends. Recently you said I was foolish

to think that there was only one rat, that if I was serious

I should put out poison. But first I would have to stop feeding the birds.

 

It came as a surprise to us both

when I told you that was

the one thing I was unwilling to do.