Chasing Rabbits.

Bunny, my rabbit, my hare, you have scratched yourself bare just to get here through the thorns and tangle of chokecherries at the base of my spine.

And I love you for that like I love the light from the stars that have already burnt out.

Bunny, you are late. The sun has gone down. The neighborhood kids come in knock-rubber soles on footpaths so their mamas won’t curse them for getting dirt on the carpet.

The street lamps have come on and my heart has burnt out. I have no more arms to hold you nor fingers to grip around another small hand. I can barely keep to grips with two clay pots at the crook of my elbows, these growing hand-formed accidents, each beauty striped by the kiln. Gold and blue, a rainbow with ice glass. Both baked in my cracked skin.

But Bunny, it’s worse now, I cannot keep the smoke from seeping in even with the lungs of the billow. But how you would be striped with onyx, gold and green. One of the most beautiful things my eyes have ever seen but they can not. My body has broken new. A closed fist and my own negligence and the toss of a vase can be a biopsy.

The loss of a vessel can be blood on the table.

Bunny, how I wish I could hear your windchime laugh through plate glass in summer. This is not a matter of love or convenience. You would have love, buckets like creek water teeming and live. Moving and ever-changing like the green of your eyes.

Sometimes loving is the chasing. Loving is the falling and the mourning clothes worn for the death of a dream you never got to hold. Bunny you shot through the trees like an arrow before the out-breath, I never knew I missed you until I had to say goodbye.

Bunny you are gone and so are other pieces, cut like easter cake from my body. But your snuffed wick smoke will stain the bones that will never hold another living thing.

Ghost hare tangled in the snare of my thorny heart.

I will hold you there, my broken rampart. 

I will hold you there and fall apart.

Only in the silence of the dark.

My Bunny, half counterpart.