What Light: This Weeks Poem: Patricia Kirkpatrick
"What Light: This Week's Poem" is sponsored by Magers and Quinn Booksellers. It brings you a poem every week by a Minnesota poet, selected by a panel of writers and publishers. Look for our anthology, What Light, at Magers and Quinn.
RABBITS
among us
their breathing
sides slim
bellows
brown loaves soft
ears
like candles
tulip
petals quick
grace in the grass
mostly alone except
when a pair comes
at dusk or dark
jiggered haunches
running after
each other like hot
lines of lead
the inked point
of bristles a brush
with death etched
in snow against pavement
hundreds of years
after Durer after Hokusai
gnawed rose
silent roan
and grey against violets
near the labor of birth
let its tremor begin
on a moonlit
hill a forage of
crabapples
the round eye of one
rabbit
holding this flicker
of wilderness
still
Poetics
There are rabbits, ancient, familiar, wild, all over my yard. All over Saint Paul when I walk. The potato chip of the natural world says a Google search.
In winter I feed carrots to rabbits knowing in summer they’ll eat all the violets.. A friend—often sustained by nature herself—asked if I were a “nature poet”.
Irish poet Eavan Boland said when I interviewed her, “There is no longer going to be a nature poem.” Isn’t nature, with or without optimism, at least a setting? Is it different than a house, a classroom, a library? I don’t usually write poems like “Rabbits,” short lines, enjambed, in which the vestige of the sentence has been lopped off. Another poet said he could live without grass. I cannot.
Biography
Patricia Kirkpatrick received a 2006 McKnight Fellowship Loft Award in Poetry.
She has published a book of poetry, Century’s Road, a chapbook,
Orioles, and several books for young readers. She is poetry editor for Water-Stone Review and teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University.
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