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The Rat Trinity
That rat's too smart
to come
to the rows of crumbs I sowed
by the pond; he has the patience of true
hunger: he'll wait me out
with
the same tenacity
I had as a child, hungry to grow
strong enough to escape the nunnery
without being caught.
I
loved the rats of Bruges
I watched from the dorm window,
how they slunk out the courtyard
sewer grill, slid along walls,
slipped
down the cellar steps
like whispers, and vanished into gray.
I loved three in particular — christened
them the Trinity:
the
Father was slick, sullen,
the Daughter tense but lissome,
and the fat-bellied one, the Holy Ghost,
maker of miracles, was the Mother.
I
imagined they came
from Antwerp, from the port's stinking
sewage by the Coal Wharf, last quay
before the wild, eager sea.
And
there were times, when
beatings seared my skin with hues
of oil on the river Scheldt, and I
squeezed my thumbs
in
my fists through long
convent nights, there were times
I prayed to the Rat Trinity. To show me
the way out,
through
Bruges sewers
and cobbled rows, then underground
to Ghent, out again through velour
fields of wheat near Antwerp,
and
hasten to my parents'
house where Mother wore silk
and Father blew smoke halos in the air.
I prayed the rats
to
bring me back to the young
whispers of their bed and into Mother's
fat, white belly. To crown them
with the trinity
they
had hungered for:
a Father, Mother, and from their fusion
not I, but unscorned, chosen: one
divine being — a son.
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Copyright © by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
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