We have a ‘humane’ trap to catch the critters that eat our dog’s food on the porch.  If it’s a big enough raccoon, they will try to roll open the heavy duty catches on the kibble container.  The hunting term for these critters is “varmint”.  It is open season year round on these beautiful but noxious varmints.

The idea is to catch them in this Hav-a-Hart trap and take them far enough away so they will be somebody else’s problem.  Maybe I should just kill them?  I have been there and that is a head burden I don’t want.

But, as so often happens, one steel from the practical world cracks against some mind-flint and sparks fly.  In this case I had been reading Gail Sher’s, One Continuous Mistake, before going outside to check on our trap.

She had been writing about practice and observation,  about being a stay-at-home writer where you ‘stick fast like an Earth axis’.  She quoted Woolf who advocated for being at home in your own mind, self-contained.  Sher asserts that there is nowhere else because anywhere else is somewhere else.

And it’s all about capturing this transience, these mind floaters, these hoboes of the streaming rail of consciousness.  She says to carry that daybook and capture those blinks of thought. Capture, capture, capture.

Now I am viewing my Hav-a-Hart trap with nothing in it and I think how I also capture other little animals in my mind’s Have-a Hart trap. And sometimes nothing. Here is a feral poem I found in my trap this morning.

 

Hav—A-Harts,

traps to capture

the possums

& feral cats

& raccoons

& (worse for you) the skunks

of your mind.

You wake in the morning

& you check the trap.

You discover the roiling,

hissing fur-ball

that did not want

to be caught,

yet there it is.

You must note it

& be careful

to take it far enough away

as you release it

into the wild

So it won’t

venture back.

Who am I kidding?

These night terrors

always

find a way

home.