"The Paris Mouse"

Until I came across the poem below on the Poem of the Day podcast, I had no idea that the legendary feminist literary scholar Sandra Gilbert was also a poet. I really like this little poem, which manages to be strikingly vivid and kind of gross and kind of cute and ultimately profound in just thirty-three lines.

Audio here, which includes a little introduction to the poem by Gilbert herself.

"The Paris Mouse"

Sandra Gilbert

hunched over the greasy

burner on the stove

was noir, as in

film noir, as in

cauchemar,

as in le nuit

not blanche but

noir, the dream you can’t

wake up from, meaning she

was a mouse fatale,

licking the old oil

glued to the old

cooktop, feasting

in her tiny hunched-up

sewer life

on fats & proteins for her

bébés all atremble in their

rotting poubel nest,

so when I screamed my piercing

Anglo-Imperial scream of

horror & betrayal—

not my stove, not my traces of

pot au feu—

she leaped, balletic, over

the sink, the fridge, the lave-vaiselle,

& back to the cave & the trash she

scuttled, grim as a witch

in La Fontaine

who has to learn

the lesson we

all must learn:

Reality is always sterner

than pleasures of the nighttime burner.