Rabbits

For my students, my teachers 

“Where does one go after aligning

themselves with the living world?” 

I ask my students, “'and the magpies circled…' 

Is this not an ego-driven avenue?” The young  

poets are slouching over the Mark

Strand poem I brought in, producing

meager commentaries on politics 

of the body with the same effort 

one uses to bend a wrist, which is to say, 

not much at all. I’m impatient to share 

the insight I believe correct, which could 

propel them toward a singular, solitary life 

in the arts. I beam at each voice, nodding 

as to not frighten them from the circle 

forever, it is the first time for some,

I can tell, angling the discussion 

toward the mirror’s reflective surface, 

toward the “emerald trees” that shimmer 

like “the pale green eyes of creatures” 

in Ivy’s poem, for which they are indifferent, 

offering an anecdote, another text. I ask them 

to write about things that happen 

only at night, what it's like inside 

the mind of another, and wandering 

through darkness for a lamp or glass

of water. They bring me odes 

to pathetic trees. I don’t know how to say 

that craft requires paddling or sails

and wind for movement, as we meet 

on Tuesday evenings for only an hour

and they seem, at this age, to need to hold

a person more than text, than not seeing. 

I accept this. But one student, his name is Carver, 

	sends me an email after the term ends 

containing a poem like a scraped knee 

about a forest walk and a “lover,” discussing 

how things end and fade and must. 

I think it plain, imagining the wooden 

beads on Carver’s bracelet dragging 

over the page as he composes until 

a line on the speed and motion of rabbits 

streaks past me like a tuft of white tail 

disappearing into low brush. The line 

rises out from the poem and floats

in space before me, glistening,

without an agenda, without 

a meaning inserted there, not one 

I can name, which thrills me. My cursor hovers 	

in the blank portal. I am wanting 

to identify points of friction, assert 

my critical frame before remembering 

the rabbits of my childhood that ran

down the path and through my poems, 

to the circle where they nibbled blackberries

in the laps of ten or so peers 

for the first time, how close we all were then

to touching that fine, strange fur we hadn’t felt,

not quite understanding, but able to tell 

that each of us were graced 

by a delicate, vanishing thing, each of us 

eager to share it. “Nice rabbit,” I reply, “keep going.”