Still Life with Rabbits and Phone

It is only a rabbit hunkered down
in this fenced-in backyard
two thousand miles from her, 
91 and frail, inside the locked
Assisted Living apartment,
not here.

Each day, across invisible sound waves,
my mother and I name and re-name the hare,
the bunny, the cottontail, the lapin,
the breathing bundle of fur and ears
hopping in and out of our words,
memories, what we string across miles
and years.

And I have fallen in love with the rabbit 
who returns each evening to a small patch
of dying grass in the middle of Central Pennsylvania
while my ailing mother in Arizona 
suggests as names, “Peter” or “Hoppy” or “Hope.”

It is only a rabbit but one morning—
when my husband and son find it
dragged and gnawed, its insides
exposed to the bloody-black world—
my mouth goes dry, no way to shape
the absence: hare, bunny, cottontail, lapin,
nonbreathing bundle of fur and ears.

Like this, time hops backwards and forward.
Hours sprawl in the dead grass.
My mother forgets the hare, bunny, cottontail, lapin,
doesn’t recall the namings, the conversations.
“Are you sure,” she whispers over the phone,
“are you sure I’m in Phoenix? Are you
certain it was a rabbit?”

When I next spy a small gray rabbit
stretched out near the fence, 
I dial her number, 
exclaim, “What shall we call him? What?”
“Hare, bunny, cottontail, lapin,” she lists.
Then, just like that, 
she lands again on “Hope.”

MARJORIE MADDOX

Marjorie Maddox, a Lock Haven University English professor and assistant editor of Presence, has published eleven collections of poetry, What She Was Saying (prose), four children’s/YA books, and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. Forthcoming in 2022 are Begin with a Question (Paraclete) and her collaborative collection with photographer Karen Elias, Heart Speaks Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts). Her website is www.marjoriemaddox.com.