"Experimental protocol: married pairs, run to extinction"

No longer raked by claws
worn to their nub with running,
even the nail grooves scratched
in the first of ten thousand trials
have been rubbed shiny
in that corridor
where all arms of the maze
end in the same dead wall.

And the mice,
running tandem,
slide on the smooth wood
around corners
and scramble for purchase
the
first
few
steps
of every unfolding straightaway.

Always, five or ten turns
from the inevitable,
their squeals pass upward
into the range of chalk
gouging a blackboard,
because they can tell,
certain as chess masters,
where they will be at the end
and exactly how they will get there.

There is no arm of the maze
they have not run cheeseless
more times
than even a graduate student
could bear to count.
Saturn's circuit is shorter
than some arms of the maze,
and they have run some routes
years on end without coming
to the inevitable wall.

But come to it they always do,
always at a dead run,
frothy,
driven by a hunger
for something
they have not tasted in years,
always turning that final corner
too fast to stop short
of enlightenment's impact.

Always, dazed and exhausted,
they rise
and turn on one another,
like minor minotaurs
who have mistaken each other,
perhaps correctly,
for the Deadelus
of their common labyrinthe,
until, too exhausted to bite,
they lie panting
up against the wall,
unable to accept
that they are not
prisoners of the maze
but of the belief
that there is an exit.