Four Poems

From A Barer Sky, which will be published on April 30 by Winter Editions

I come alone through the courtyard
on one of spring's first full days
and encounter a woman on a laptop
and, by her side, a rabbit

I had just read about a rabbit
a world-record-holding rabbit
that had died in the carriage
of an airplane, on a voyage

I greet the woman and the rabbit
and they mutually ignore me
they are both tenants
what weapon could defend them

they snap their own necks
under stress, rabbits

in the yard across the way from M's house
in my sister's dream, looming by her nightstand
there are rabbits
of different sizes, of different,
aliveness
(alivenesses)
oddly still, observing

still you make your own life
though it begins before you are ready
and there is never enough time
there are rabbits

even the dead one
whose skin I keep
change inside

back in the day of museums
if you remember
there was one north of the city
where a room had been styled to resemble
the simple quarters of the early Christians

on the wall of that room
a painting of precisely that room
but in that image, annunciation

tell me an angel
a trick of the eye

there is a high school on the beach
where the bleachers look over at the city beyond
and beyond that, ocean

even one October
mid-Monday
there is no one

a gap opens between the populous
and sparse worlds

and what appears there
is leporine