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The Gospel of Q Students ask me whether there was a real rabbit when I read the rabbit poems. I didn’t know how many I had until they pointed it out, and I tell them no there wasn’t a rabbit which is true because writers tell truths, but was a lie because that is what writers do, too. I had a rabbit, I tell them, when I was a girl and it died, as all pets do, but no, Mr. Snuffles didn’t exist nor did the one who ate the ribbon causing knots in its intestines nor the one where the neighbor skinned it for biting him. None of them were real. They should know better I say, than to look for veracity in art. And then I remember Patrick’s dad, the Hughes’ living next door to us on West Cliff Road – now this is true – and he was a hunter, and one cold November morning during small game season -- language I wouldn’t know until I was a woman – he hung eight skinned rabbits on the tree on his lawn. I guess it was to let the blood drip out, I really don’t know; it doesn’t make sense to me, but I recall it now, how I walked past them for three days on the way to my bus stop and then home again; was I in second grade, maybe? And how I learned to look straight ahead, ignore the bodies shiny with morning dew on their exposed lean muscle; how I knew not to ask Patrick, just a boy himself; how I had no words for this; how no one in the neighborhood said anything, not condoning or condemning. But this isn’t a poem about them, or about Patrick’s dad, or even the doomed damned rabbits. It’s about what’s missing, never said, not remembered, unrealized, removed, recast. If I said it was about what that little girl who was me lost, I’d be wrong, too. I want some student to ask about Patrick, about what happened to him, and is he somewhere trying to write his way back to me. I’m certain he’s not because he never existed, and when I tell you that’s the truth you will think I will have lied, which I haven’t, though in a way I wish I had.
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