The People Leporidae
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
—John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”
I vowed to give a rabbit religion, a weight to match
her bulk in my prepubescent arms. Sunlight illuminating
her ears like church windows: pink pulse, spider veins,
the altar’s velvet. When you hold a rabbit like a child,
her toes stretch to reveal claws like crochet hooks. Teeth,
unshorn, will grow until they pierce her skull like a crown
of thorns like a spear like Longinus like a stake.
I told my rabbit, you’ll be eaten one day.
I’ve only taken sacrament once, barely remember
the wafer on my tongue, dry and disembodied.
But I have suckled tender meat
off the bones of young rabbits. I have drank
their broth, their marrow. What we know
about them is an index of our power .
My cousin’s bunny had a twisted neck,
one eye forever fixed upward. I had a parakeet
who died of a ruptured hernia. My friend’s guinea pig
lost both front teeth to a fall and starved.
The image of a wild animal becomes
the starting-point of a daydream:
a point from which the day-dreamer departs
with his back turned. I only pitied her
when I learned she wasn’t eaten. My rabbit
lived as a doe, a hulking presence in the hutch.
She grew beyond tenderness, beyond a pink
tongue-worm nursing on my fingers. She grew
red-eyed, yellowed, and mean. She heard
the kenneled fox hounds yowl. She heard
the chicken slaughter. The goose hiss.
The kittens bagged and drowned in the river.
Through the chicken wire, she saw the farmer’s boy
tie a mouse-sized noose for the morsels he found,
eviscerated by the tom. He hanged them on the doorway
for lack of lamb’s blood. And for this life I taught her
religion. Sat in a bathtub with a livestock rabbit
and said, These are your people, while I read her
Watership Down and repeated El-ahrairah, El-ahrairah,
remember who he is.
Source: Poetry (January 2022)