There is no utopia

I interrupt the regularily scheduled program to complain about one aspect of country living: the pests!

Yesterday I found a wee mouse alive in an empty jar that had been sitting on the floor in the basement. I threw the mouse in the front bushes, still alive. Its my policy. The jars are in the same room as our cats' litter boxes. Last week I found a not so wee mouse floating face down in the water I left in the kitchen sink overnite. This mouse was not so lucky. It had drowned. I expect to not find any mice in our house at all. With four cats, professional assasins, I might add, you would think this would be a non issue.

I knew the mouse in the kitchen had been living under the stove for sometime. In fact, one day i found it on the top of a window blind just out of reach of one of our "professionals". From there it did a somersault leap to the kitchen floor and scurried under the stove and thats where it stayed I guess till it got thirsty and I made the horrible discovery in the sink . I was totally surprised that we would have a mouse in our furnace room; the same room the cats regularily visit to relieve themselves if they aren't outside. Apparently I am feeding them too much, or they are spending far too much time on the couch. And this leads me to another subject (i showed this to my sister as a periodic "Make Art Every Day" email series and all she replied was "your weird", so again, i just do it for fun and i think i should keep my day job...)


THERE IS NO UTOPIA

The ants in my kitchen
herald the coming of spring.
The ants with their anthills
in the rose garden, they won’t come in
the house again this season.

Small like flax seed, big as a house
Ticks drop from the trees, or the rafters,
or the porch. The cats bring them in on their fur
and they crawl up my toes from the rug

June bugs barrel into the screen door,
nightly, like bombardiers
They litter the porch come morning.
Their large bronze bodies stiff and crunchy
Summer has arrived

The cicadas buzz and sing
Crickets and grasshoppers and slugs
Lay waste to my hostas
Or slip through the cracks
in the screen door and I have to catch them
to throw them back outside.

Autumn marks the soybean harvest
and a plague of ladybugs all red and black.
Like the children’s poem,
I wish they would fly away.
Instead of hovering around my house
on warm days.
They are everywhere and they smell
Like the earth in my vacuum, and they bite.

Elder bugs the color of leaf litter
In great hoards, same as lady bugs but
They look like cockroaches
And they are everywhere, in my kitchen
And I hate them.
I have reached my limit of tolerance.
This year I will kill them.