The snow has long since melted, Ann,
but you’ll never believe,
while it still fell
a chipmunk snuck into the old cabin.
That shit only happens in short stories.
He used to wait obediently at the back door,
like a pet dog, seeming to ask us,
while we scraped our dinners into mute mouths,
when will you let me out of here?
but when we opened the door to let him slip away,
he’d refuse, and scurry off
to hide in the dark crevice beneath the bed
until, through sex, mostly,
we had been distracted from his want to escape.
Then he would return, clawing at the back door,
irritating our trained silence.
In your fumblings, Ann, you forgot theft
as a mode of retelling.
This is my poem of a boy;
he grew up, fell in love,
and spent a winter with his lover in the country.
That chipmunk did escape one of those winter evenings.
It was late and I think we had both had a bit too much.
I went out back for a cigarette,
as she lay, in a sweatshirt and tight jeans,
asleep on the couch. He followed me out,
gray and probably a bit balding.
I watched him freeze to death,
as I sat, motionless from cold or drink,
on the wooden patio furniture.
Really, it was predestined, Ann,
because all tiny creatures die in the end,
must die in the end.
No one expects the small things to survive.
I left his still body on the back patio,
to be routinely covered by snow.
Then the thaw came, we moved,
and we must have left him out there.
You said, Ann, that neither you nor your lover
could have said where the heart was, but in my case,
we both briefly knew. He darted about the cabin,
then died and was forgotten—dry and motionless,
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