The Hare, The Moon


And due east? Probably some great whale

thrashing about, spouting orders for extra

salt for his sea.


Period.


                      Meanwhile, back in the wither –

my wintered prairie

(world’s biggest flat-top haircut, flour-doused)

a giant white hare hurtles

zaggy through the streets. I’ve seen it twice, now.

No one believes me. The animal I swear I see

defrocked as mere hyperbole,

the ravings of a divorcee.

                                    A life clotted with adjectives.

And the very nights of the hare, the moon (O don’t

go there – can’t help it, never could resist

an over-subscribed hunk of rock).

Blimp klezmer accordion-glare on high. White-collared

as the supreme court.

Edicts. (Houston’s got a problem with hyphens, too.)


The prairie is not a pipe. Rather, an ironed urn

duct-taped to a snow shovel.

Ekphrasis:
Magritte’s The Treachery of Images


In the end you

argue with every last

famed framed smoking widget.

This is not a pipe?

It is, it damned well is –

you smoked it.

These are not your lungs?

O but they are. What you hear

isn’t meta-coughing –

No, real hacking, the genuine

article, not some inner-ear ruse

or tympanic panic stunt, no sir.

Pass the tissues.

It really happened, it did.

It wasn’t just a symbol, some

mirrored pipe dream or

sainted X to mark a plot.

This is not a life said the X.

It was. It was a life.

Page 3

© Copyright, 2015, Jeanette Lynes.
All Rights Reserved.