Excerpt from World of Made and Unmade: A Poem
from Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade: A Poem
. . .
The mouse behind the filing cabinet
isn’t a mouse at all, but a rat or maybe
a chipmunk dead behind the wall—
and starting the long haul into bone-dom.
I move my papers to the dining room,
—the drafts of contracts, the permits,
—the white binder of death instructions.
The little white flags of prescriptions.
Elegant, restrained, filled with resonant spaces, and bell-clear with feeling, Mead’s book-length poem World of Made and Unmade retells the last weeks of her mother’s life. A reader might want 
to ponder any of the quiet, evocative moments in the poem. Mead deftly enlarges even the smallest scene. In the scene above, the poem turns from the foregrounded and visible acts of the mother’s dying to a death the poet can’t see but presumably smells. A mouse? Another animal? An unseen death behind the implied orderliness, the controlled and human-constructed index of a file cabinet. A death out of reach. And though it is only a small death, it disturbs the poet and pushes her out of lived routines.
Whatever animal has died has begun its way “into bone-dom.” Mead remains clear-eyed: bone-dom. She does not romanticize. She makes no denial, but her dry wit tries to use language to control what, ultimately, the poet cannot control.
Avoiding the smell, the poet moves, or tries to, but takes her mother’s dying (the white binder) with her. The poet cannot escape, nor can her mother, and so the white flags of the prescriptions: a metaphorical surrender, to pain, to illness, to the limits of human body, and to grief. The flags seem a small image: the white of the binder, the white flags of the prescription, and the white that might mean unmarked, empty, barren, sterile. And yet they stand as synonyms for loss.
from Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade: A Poem, 2016.