“…the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” — Isaiah 11:7
“Is this what it’s like…a little blood here, a chomp there … must everything whole be nibbled?” — Annie Dillard
Hawk’s hooked beak
clips Rabbit’s spine, clips her screech.
Rabbit rolls her eyes to see
a strip of her own twitching meat
worm free through her ripped pelt-pleat
like a maggot sprouts from a spilt gut,
or a playful lover teeth-tugs
a lower lip.
For a moment she has the same
terrible vision as Hawk
atop a thermal loft:
the navel topos of the crops;
the axised earth eastchasing
the sun, convexing tantric
like the deep-heaving
breasts of day,
or the onion uncellaring
of death’s undominion.
To refuse this little death would set
the centrifuge askew:
A peach-stone could
not sprout through
hawk-scat pellets of rabbitfur refùse—
and thus rèfuse the green fuse,
undriving the blossom,
denying Rabbit’s son
the nibble of peach nodes
under skies starved of starved Hawk shadows.
Death eats with three stomachs.
Am I resolved to believe that Hawk’s hooked beak
will sometime be hammered into Hummingbird’s flute?
Could we all be sustained on the nectar of a peach
clinging to a tree?
