A Woman, a Mouse, and a Shrew

Held between my hands, my face feels thin as a comb.

And cold.

I’ve been thinking about All the Dead Dears, the uneasy poem Sylvia Plath penned following a visit to the Archaeological Museum in Cambridge. The poem details a stone coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing the skeletons of a woman, a mouse, and a shrew. The ankle bone of the woman has been slightly gnawed. Plath’s lines make it clear she found no closure in death.

Consider: Sylvia Plath, unhappy in the constant squall of her own too-sharp thoughts, suicided at the age of thirty.

Where do my indecent, my own morose thoughts go after knocking at my door? Do they scurry off to cower in a corner like a mouse or a shrew, waiting for a chance to rush back and gnaw at my ankle before we enter our bruised eternity?

—Mitchell Hegman