Rabbit Bones: Late June, Ohio
Along the road I saw a rabbit
cast aside by a car,
a broken piece of soft sky
lying in the grass. We were rushing
and didn’t stop to look over its body,
to run our fingers across its broken bones,
to kiss the insides of its soft ears.
It was cool, the corn
only thigh high though it was June.
Everything a patchwork quilt,
barns and farms. I wondered
what people here think about.
Gardening, knitting, chopping
wood, trying not to freeze to death?
But maybe that’s not fair. I’ll admit
I’m a snob for New Orleans: snorting busses
jostling over potholes,
the slow kill of the heat on the sidewalk,
lingering on the porch to watch the world
move, to watch your neighbor park her car,
walk down the street with a baby
and the question: How you doing?
Received with a nod and returned:
How you doing?
And always cockroaches, cockroaches,
cockroaches,
big as three quarters stacked in a row
and once a possum,
bold enough to creep into the kitchen
while I was cooking with my mom.
Once a wolf
rumored to be roaming across
Fontainebleau Avenue. But never
rabbits.
And everything there’s a different rhythm,
the heat melting your brain
until your X-ray could be a rabbit’s
X-ray and it’s you in the grass,
you in pieces,
you zig-zagging
your way
into rabbit
heaven.
God’s Flowers: Catawba Mountain, Virginia
I.
In the valley everything is constantly falling. You lie there in your little cocoon, and all you hear is soft pat pat pat. Half asleep, you are sure it is the whole world falling. These are sticks now but soon it will be limbs, branches, the trees you hang between, then the whole forest and finally the entire mountain on top of you.
But in the morning you are still alive and instead everything is covered in little white flowers. Bell shaped, crisp. They crunch between your fingers. You drop one: tap.
You look up but they are nowhere to be found in the trees above. They must be fallen pieces of sky, hardened by air on the way down.
II.
There’s nothing like a mountain to make you wish you were in love, or else a baby, or else god. The wind rocking your hammock blowing around your bare feet, the shorter trees, the imperceptibly thinner air.
On the mountain everything from the valley is offered up in echos between the trees and dirt and cliffs and received like penance on the ridge. Dogs barking 200 feet down, cows lowing. You hold their voices in your hands as the light turns from golden to gray. The whole world echoing up to you from the valley below. And isn’t this as worthy a news story as any: a whippoorwill. An owl. The cows going in at night. The slow gradations of light.
