A man talks to a row of dead rats hanging from his string, and somewhere in the middle of his patter the talk stops being a boast and becomes a confession. Dave Bonta's speaker is a professional rat catcher, paid by the body, and the poem's central idea is that he and his victims are more alike than his trade allows him to admit. All of them live on leftovers, and above them sits someone who eats well.
The poem opens by dressing the rats in strange, almost fond images. They are "lady's purses," "tack-toed / wallops of white silk," "grim grins." A strung-up rat does look a little like a limp pouch, and "wallops" suggests both a blow and something bulging like a wallet, so the creatures are already half money. "Tack-toed" turns tiny claws into the sound of scrabbling on a floor, and "grim grins" gives us the bared teeth of the dead, with a joke in the alliteration. Then the metaphor becomes literal: the rats are "as good / as legal tender for my room & board." The speaker pays for his bed with corpses.
His position is oddly precarious. He and his dog are welcome at an inn "only so long / as you are not, my beauties." The line break leaves "not" hanging before the dash, and the sentence admits a paradox. He needs the rats to exist, or he has no work, and he needs them gone, or he has no welcome. "My beauties" is half mockery and half tenderness, and the speaker doesn't settle which. Hence the quiet summary, "we're tied together in a way," where the string that carries the bodies also binds hunter to hunted.
The poem is a single block of short, uneven lines with no rhyme and no regular meter. It reads like muttering aloud, which suits a dramatic monologue addressed straight to the rats. The ampersand turns up again and again, in "room & board," "dog & I," "sun & scorn," "dark & swarming nations." It looks casual, but it keeps pairing things, and the poem is about pairings: man and dog, catcher and caught, labourer and lord. The hat that "wards off / two kinds of yellow, sun & scorn" is a good example. The sun's yellow is plain enough, and I would read the other yellow as the colour of contempt or sickly disdain, though the poem doesn't say. Either way, the hat shields him from his customers' opinion as much as from the weather, so we learn that his trade is despised even while it is paid for.
The tone turns on "How dare we subsist / on the hard- / won crumbs of brutes!" The break in "hard- / won" makes the reader stumble over the effort the phrase describes. The "we" is the poem's boldest move, because it seems to gather the speaker, his dog and the rats into one hungry company. "Brutes" is the sharper word. Normally it would be flung at vermin, but here it falls on whoever owns the crumbs, so the insult is turned back on the people who hire him.
"But the trap is a good teacher" is flat and aphoristic, and I find it the most unsettling line. The rats learn from the trap, but so, by implication, does the speaker. Anyone who lives off a snare has to see how easily he could be caught in one himself.
The final sentence runs five lines and widens the poem's view. The speaker imagines that somewhere the rats "must have / your own canny king, making free / with all the best morsels of dark / & swarming nations." Rat society now mirrors human society, with a few at the top feasting and the swarm below scrabbling. The phrase "morsels of dark" is peculiar and good, since it makes darkness itself something to be eaten and gives the rats a whole hidden economy. The word "nations" lifts them from pests to peoples. The speaker never says that human kings take the best morsels too, but the comparison is plain.
That restraint is much of the poem's strength. In eighteen lines Bonta gives us a morally awkward working man who is neither villain nor hero. He kills, and he still recognises the creatures he kills. The poem asks who really profits when the poor feed on the poor, and it leaves the answer hanging at the end of the string.