The Reader
You were hurt.
You covered your wound with your hand.
I asked to see.
* * * * *
A Snail
In its fixed form,
the poem asks you to live.
But your form is different.
A snail puts me in mind
of my mind
in its folds across the page.
Asks for you,
but you have no explanation —
voice of my mother across the line.
Voice that breaks the folds of her silence
as she thanks me
for speaking to her.
* * * * *
The Rabbits
As a child, I ate rabbit, though
I didn’t
know it. My father
kept them in hutches
along the high back fence. Every
once in a while, we’d have a special
dish called “long chicken.”
He let us touch their fur
through the wire of their cages
when he fed them.
They were quiet —
they made no noise. The mothers
would eat the babies if we bothered
them too much,
he told us.
Finally, the story itself became
too hard to tell. Or there
was a hard winter —
or the new dog
troubled the rabbits.
In any case, the hutches
disappeared,
and all of this was forgotten.
The high fence began to lean.
My father put in a few
slanted buttresses.
Out of sight, behind the playhouse,
my two younger brothers and I learned
to climb the buttresses to the top
of the fence and hop over it.
The fence was there to protect us from what?
We knew we had two sisters
who drowned before we were born,
after they had gone through the gate of another place
my parents had lived.
Did they have rabbits there too?
I don’t know.
Behind the fence,
we dropped into an open field.
We stumbled through vines of wild
gourds and grass as tall
as we were.
The gourds rattled. Beneath their
leaves
we uncovered skulls with long front teeth.
We thought they were fossils.
We stacked them with the gourds.
Then we found a way back over the fence.
The rabbits are quiet in this story,
as are my siblings, and my father
for the most part, and my mother,
each a separate life.
* * * * *
Anniversary
First picture of the waiting sky
I learned,
a long handle, a cup of light.
Meander with me on the Earth.
You go the other way.
I’ll meet you here.
/ / / /
To read “Three Days,” “Coppice” and “Cicadas” by Peter Streckfus, published earlier On The Seawall, click here.