The Hare

She settles into her depression achieves her perfect form in flat still camouflage The dim farmer cannot know how she surveys his labours behind beaded spider webs The fox and the hawk care not that she has taken the earth as her lover. She pushes against his silence, his intransigence, feels cold strength spreading to the tips of her scarred ears The sun is lost in a barley pod but spring will come again with its frenzy and its terror In the grip of her loins’ madness she will take her place in the wind to box and bite their necks The farmer barks something in his tongue and she feels right to run, springs out across the field, quicksilver in the jelly of his eye sinews packed with surviving fire. She has unanswerable questions One night she dreamed she was an owl. Another night, she swam in warm seas. Another still, she grew old and died. She lives by phases of the moon. She holds what she has close. Everything else cannot ever matter.