Grief evolves

Huffy Henry hid the day

I wrote this last night. It's the fourth poem I've written about Shuriken since he died on July 4, 2011. The first poem was very intellectual and ceremonial, unintentionally. The second infantilized him. The third berated him. This one, I hope, reaches past the pettiness of intelligence, sentiment, and anger and grasps what I wanted to write all along: something close and honest. Anyway, it's metered, for those with the ears for it, but not drudgingly, I pray. Also, I chose five twelve-line stanzas and a sixth cut to six to count the number of months he lived.

            Poem for my rabbit

                        Had he been one of us, he would have made

                                An awful spirit

                                                             Byron, Manfred

In the twilight hours, you come

Creeping, your determined quiet

Sudden in its scope, auroral,

Like the heat around a star

Gone black with its impatience—

To my feet, where we commence

Our mutual, glad orbit. Each

Near-collision shiver-shocks us

In our sad, old, animal fondness,

Where the shadows don’t mean death

And the people disappear, because

They want to. That’s how night begins.

I notice a new absence, if

You make it: with a thump or tactless,

Inexplicable display

Of honking, you alert me; and,

Like water on an incline, I

Observe your law. But it’s a just law:

Why should any king go hungry

When his subjects gorge themselves?

And how can beauty languish, if

Unloveliness find suitors there?

Ours is a rational universe

And you its very architect.

Nevertheless, mystery moves us,

And your logic can be curious.

Strange cause abounds, and purpose,

Although evident, lacks clearness.

Consider: your blind rage at litter,

Spitefully digging at it, while

We wonder, what fresh hell is this?

Or why the affectation (though

Charming and splendid) not to touch?

The circling, buzzing, cat-and-mouse

Imperial pomp, only to spurn

The hand that meekly begs a lick?

Maybe we trapped you there, in childhood,

Refusing you the profits of old age,

Where frank desire grows franker, but

More clear, and mournful in its knowledge

These are gifts. And to deprive you

Of the grief that civilizes,

Makes us sane, and marries us,

Never was our meaning, never.

All we wanted was your shelter;

But in our worry, kept you young,

Fretful and arrogant, and craven,

A fitful tyrant with kind eyes.

None of that matters when you come.

Darkness divides us into that

Best loneliness, but you, swift-footed, stealing

And unlistened for, make wholeness.

In my human sickness, frightened

By the mind that calls me person,

By fear that makes more fear, by fearing,

You teach me to close distances;

To unlearn imagination;

To be animal again,

And, with an animal good sense,

Make a simple thing of living.

Tonight, three months since you were dead,

As I sit here, writing this,

Knowing you’ll never come again

To heal me, it occurs to me

That I’ll suffer for this closeness,

But I choose it anyway.