for janus

Our rat, Janus, died on the 26th of November from a respiratory infection. She was less than one year old, and her sickness seemed to come out of nowhere.

I needed to create something beautiful for her. She gave this poem to me. I had been wanting to get back into writing poetry for a long time, but the words had previously refused to come.

I held her cold body,

And I thought

Of what people sometimes say

About the dead:

She is no longer in there.

She has gone somewhere else.

But I do not think this is true--

For we are only our bodies.

But I understand

Why we say this of our beloved

For I looked at the little body in my hands,

Felt terrible stiffness of her,

Once warm, wriggling,

But frozen now--

I was almost scared to touch her.

Where has all that life gone?

A rat’s life is swift

And full of motion.

Adventurous creatures who meet their small world

With bright eyes and twitching spider-silk whiskers.

Rarely still--

The little heart beating time away

So quickly.

It was the utter stillness of her

That shocked me.

I imagined phantom movements

A breath, a nod of the head--

Where have you gone, little one?

If you are not here, then where are you?

We buried her beneath a dark pine,

Nestling her body between its roots

So that the tree might drink of her,

Drawing new life from her death.

Her fur was bright against that hole we made.

We covered her with the dry, golden needles

That had fallen all around.

Death is another door that

We walk through.

Nothing ever truly dies,

For all the matter of this world is recycled, for all time.

And though she might not feel it,

This little one who spent her brief life in warm, happy domestication,

Safe, content, but ever bound

to a world of walls,

Will become a part of the forest where we laid her body down.

She will be the bodies of a thousand-thousand tiny beings of the soil,

And the soft new leaves of spring,

And the air, and the rain.

We are all made of things that were.

--------------------

Rest well, Janus.