John Biscello

At the severest hour, everything fell within.

A banquet hall after the crash, after the deluge, and you,

a mouse, courting lull, tracked pawprints in flour,

stalking floorboards for crumbled manna.

You, the mouse, with slow heaven firing your eyes,

appraising the mess, and determined to put the house back in order.

Sure, it was a tall task for a meek creature,

but you had stilted symmetry and angelic stutters on your side,

they were your virtues and allegiances, and so, approximating

in soulfingered shorthand, in radical glyphs, you set to work.

The house screamed, cried, quieted down, moaned and gagged

and lolled its split flaring tongues.

Haunted houses, you see, are very much like children

who are waiting to be fed the right spiritual candy, sweetly everlasting

in its cherried peace.

You and the house were one,

every speck of dust doubling as starglint in your pinkest eye,

every untucked sheet awaiting your deliberate touch,

every shuttered window a warning sign,

every faded dream shadowed in storied nooks,

you, the mouse, didn’t live in the house, you lived through it,

as one would portals, or a bloodstream, to let yourself

out meant burrowing deeper within.

So you sang, endlessly, barrowing breath into craft,

and through love’s rimless labor,

showed us that stillest psalms

run deeper still.