Mouse Drowned in Bucket

Meniscus memory, you hold your shape,
A perfect cloud of you in the bucket:
Six cold months, or less perhaps, you've sailed
A miniscule ocean in interior winter nights.

A rhythmic gymnast, looped and coiled about
With freeze-frame squirls of ribbon; not so agile
To escape, no easy spring to bold applause, just
The end, occluded in the soft vignette of a pail.

I tip you out; your space dissolves. Your tiny
Bones crumble, splattered to mush across the compost,
Broken needle-tips specking a grey sludge.

A sullen will kept your integrity intact
In the clockless silence of that dead house.
We bore distasteful witness to it at last.