Rabbiting

Rabbiting

​​Instinctive, even, this knowing

that most of the tender stuff we push 

into the world won’t make it far, 

so can you blame us if we stash it away

in a thatch of tall grass or wrapped 

in willow leaves beneath a pallet 

leaned against the side of a white fence?

 

And most days we find ourselves

once again right, our womb-work 

carried off squeaking into the night, held 

in the clutch of claws just searching

for something soft to squeeze.

But sometimes, as made clear by

the sheer abundance littering the field

this evening, we’re all too pleased to be 

wrong, and something for which we labored 

somehow slipped away beyond

even the suffocating grip 

of our most directive instincts,

furrowing off to burrow in 

the fertile dark of some fern-thick forest, 

where even now it goes on

making, making, making