Few elegies begin with a rat, and fewer let the animal matter so much. The coined phrase "heart rat" carries the poem's first surprise. It sounds like "heart rate", the figure on a hospital monitor, with one letter missing, and it also suggests the animal closest to someone's heart. The clinical and the tender are fused in two words, and the poem keeps both in play until the end. Its central idea is simple and hard: a life is measured by whether anyone held it, and "luck" can be a bitter word when it is applied to a death.
The opening stanza is built from images of violence. The heart is imagined as a rat caught in the "ribcage / trap", and the word "trap" is stranded at the far right of its line, like something snapping shut. Then comes an anonymous "they" who "peeled back the skin, broke the skull beneath / to search for what cannot be found." The poem does not say who they are or why they search. Judging by the imagery, it could be a post-mortem or something worse. The last line also reaches past the body. What "cannot be found" might be a cause of death, a soul, or a reason, and no knife will reach it. The grammar is knotted too. An escape that comes "too late to save its brain" is hardly an escape. In this stanza the rat is still "its", a specimen.
The middle section turns inward to the act of writing. "Line after line we try / to shed our shroud of lies" is the poem's one stretch of tidy rhyme: "try", "lies" and "high" chime almost like a nursery rhyme. The speaker admits to aiming "too high" and says they fear not heights but the oubliette. An oubliette is a dungeon entered only through a trapdoor, and the word comes from the French for "to forget". The poem plays on this when it speaks of the place "where words forget to hide our fear". The idea is that language normally covers our fear, and here it fails. The layout acts this out. "Afraid" sits alone in its indented space, and "when" dangles at the end of a line over a gap, as if the speaker were hesitating before stepping onto thin ice.
What follows is the poem's turning point, and it is a collapse. "& then the poem disappears" does what it says. The rhyme stops and so does the elaborate imagery, and the sentence that follows is plain speech: "you tell me how you held her in your hands / as she died." The ampersand has already made the voice casual and spoken, and now the speaker is simply a listener. The poem is addressed to a friend, and its clever machinery gives way in front of that friend's confession. The pronoun has changed as well. The rat that was "its brain" is now "her", held in two hands. The shift gives her a dignity that the opening stanza's "they" never allowed.
The ending turns on the word "lucky". "Your heart rat was one of the lucky ones" is an odd thing to say about a dead animal, and the poem explains it in the next line: "She was loved, / not experimented on." The comparison is only implied, but it is sharp. Luck here has nothing to do with survival. It means being held at the end, and being treated as someone rather than something. The last couplet, "If only / we could all be so lucky…", widens the "we" past the rat and the friend to include the reader. Its trailing ellipsis leaves the thought unfinished, and the reader can supply the unlucky: everything and everyone who dies unheld, unnamed, or searched for and not mourned.
The poem matters because it does not offer easy consolation. It admits that its own craft is a "shroud of lies", lets that craft fall away, and finds what remains more truthful: one friend's account of a small death, and the fact of being loved. In the space of a few short lines it asks what poetry can do against grief, and answers that the poem can only step aside for the story that is told to it.