If we had notified animal control, the officer’s report might have included the phrase a male juvenile.
Laura called me into the kitchen.
“Look,” she said, pointing to a shape at the end of the garden path. “How cute is that?”
On the other side of the screened window, a long-bodied rabbit lay sleeping in the evening heat, between the Saint Francis statue and the BPA-free water dispenser. The back legs pumped in rapid circles, pedaling a bicycle through a lagomorphic dreamscape.
“Very cute,” I said.
Then the pedaling stopped.
I grabbed the binoculars from the windowsill.
“The tail,” I said. “It’s black.”
The ears were long. The hind legs, too. Not a desert cottontail, then. Not really a rabbit at all. Lepus californicus, a black-tailed jackrabbit. A hare.
They live in the arroyo. We’re always happy to see one in our yard. But they rarely come around. They’re shy, intimidated by the quail and white-winged doves squabbling over the seed blocks.
Laura recited what she remembered of a Hindu prayer. She went off to find a shovel while I put on a black KN95 mask and purple nitrile gloves.
I stepped outside. No sign of injury. Nose free of bloody foam. One clear brown eye held a trace of light.
It was easy for me to lift his little body with the shovel and cradle him in its blade. To ferry him past the rock wall, carry him down the arroyo, tip him into the scrub for the carrion birds.
“I’m sorry, sweet baby.”
Laura, watching from the path, asked me what I’d said. I didn’t answer.
An hour before sunrise, I woke to the soft pelt of rain. I wanted to cover him.
on the other side be happy clear light sweet baby
CRAFT NOTE: In a haibun, one or more prose paragraphs are followed by a haiku that comments on the preceding text, or deepens it. The burning haibun, invented by torrin a. greathouse, integrates erasure into the form. Maybe today’s poem, with an exploded lune as its erasure component, could be called an excarnated haibun.
I applaud your choice of the haibun for this significant event. A fitting tribute and meditation.
Awwww. Sweetness and sadness all in one sitting.