Reading Poetry to My Rabbits

I'm always telling others, "put the stuck in it." Wherever it is you get stuck with your writing, write that down. Then keep writing and see what happens.

So let's see what happens.

Starting with where I got stuck

The truth is was going to share this post two weeks ago. Working to finish it up, it became too painful looking at photographs of Dilly's last days, then I got in a funk, had a panic attack in a forest, and wrote a different post instead. 

This summer, we had to send my beloved rabbit Dilly over the rainbow bridge.

On the day the veterinarian found bone cancer in Dilly's leg, the news devastated me. My mind couldn't process the information. It was already clear she'd been in pain for months, pain we'd thought was other things. 

We brought Dilly home for a long weekend, and scheduled a vet for a home visit for Monday.

What poetry to read to my rabbits?

Those few days were beautiful and horrible, side-by-side. There were moments of hysterical laughter, and lots of crying. I found myself reaching for poetry.

I wanted to try to honor her departure with meaning and dignity. There are so many ways to go about this. Poetry just happens to be the way that I know best.

So I scanned my shelf for collections that felt in any way fit for the moment, and pulled down Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's Hello, the Roses, and Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven.

We read the Gilbert first. Dilly and her brother Claude gathered around me, what choice did they have? I crowded the floor of their rabbitat with my body and the books.

They took turns chewing the pages and corners, and friend, I couldn't bring myself to intervene—the physicality of the books forever shaped by that weekend.

From Gilbert's poem "Kunstkammer":

Our body is not good at memory, at keeping.

It is the spirit that holds onto our treasure.

The dusk in Italy when the ferry passed Bellagio

and turned across Lake Como in the hush to where

we would land and start up the grassy mountain.

The body keeps so little of the life after

being with her eleven years,

and the mouth not even that much. But the heart

is different. It never forgets

the pine trees with the moon rising behind them

every night. Again and again we put our

sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed

them back into their death, each moving slowly

into the dark, disappearing as our hearts

visited and savored, hurt and yearned.

The first page of "Matter" by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, with rabbit teeth marks in the margins—tiny perforations at angles. The poem opens with these lines: "We call change in a person the effect of time. / It separates everything you were from what happens now." The text of the poem continues on the page in a partial view of the page, reading "Elements embedded in one another, vein of jade in quartz, a garnet in graphite are separate in space. / Chromoplasts extending a red vein in a...")

Could you let grief make the familiar(s) strange again?

Reading poems gave me an anchor that weekend. Lyric time permitted me wormholes when Monday felt like a giant ticking clock from which I couldn't escape.

It's almost a cliche that people turn to poetry in times of celebration and grief, and I'm no different. Nothing made sense. Poetry welcomed all of me, cognitive dissonances and anticipatory grief and all.

We didn't make it all the way through the Berssenbrugge. Dilly died in Kalamazoo, in Waning Gibbous.

I believe humans rarely deserve non-human animals. I have been blessed to be visited by many. 

Here's the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who believed in the notion of Familiars:

It is the familiar spirit of the place;

It judges, presides, inspires Everything in its empire; It is perhaps a fairy or a god? When my eyes, drawn like a magnet

To this cat that I love...

"My Imps names are..."

Some time ago, I happened upon this historical image, the frontispiece to a 1647 pamphlet titled The Discovery of Witches.

[Public domain image. Frontispiece from The Discovery of Witches (1647), a pamphlet published by witch hunter Matthew Hopkins]

The frontispiece is a vertically oriented line drawing in black and white. Top and center appears a fancy man in a pilgrim hat, holding a long stick. He’s looking out at two women who are seated in chairs, surrounded by various creatures such as a dog, a rabbit, a newt, and others less recognizable.

One of the women is saying into a speech banner, “My Imps names are…” Each creature is labeled with a name, like “Vinegar tom.” The rabbit is labeled “Sacke & Sugar.” The women each point or gesture with one hand, and rest their other hand in their laps. Across the top of the image reads: “Matthew Hopkins Witch Finder Generall.”

Witch finders at that time were paid a lot of money by local magistrates to turn women in. A birthmark or mole plus the fact that you keep a pet was enough to torture you and put you to death. That means most of us could fit the mark of having a familiar, but it comes as no surprise that Hopkins mostly targeted poor and old women.

 Here's Berssenbrugge, from her poem "Pure Immanence":

I don't feel connected to what I experience, and I speak with him about it.

I try to connect through the outline of an animal, starting with our dog, then turn to a black wing against the sky.

When I see a picture of the beloved animal, I think of that animal, who isn't here.

The principle of association moves me beyond an image to belief, and passion fixes my mind on Chaco.

The frontispiece looks almost like a family portrait. Hopkins, two women, and a menagerie of animals. He and the seated women form an equilateral triangle in the image, with him at the top, the women in the two bottom corners. In the foreground of the image, all the creatures, with the most fantastical of creatures front and center. Hopkins is smiling, and slightly facing one woman more than the other.

I read Hopkins compelled one woman to stay awake for four days, after which she allegedly confessed to being a witch, calling her familiars by their name and description. The animal names in the image are numbered, like a diagram.  

People, places, things, and what we call them

I feel like I read so often that the full moon is a time to release as if that is some simple thing. Like letting go is just a little checklist item on the month's lunar cycle.

That's not really so easy to do. I was going to publish this post on the full moon, but I held onto it instead, and here we are more than two weeks later. 

 Once again out of words, I'll turn to someone else's:

Remember all of this the next time you play with your pet. They are the gatekeepers, protectors of your magic, and will bring you clarity. (Teen Vogue)

Reader, whether you have a pet, a familiar, a service or emotional support animal, or none of the above at the moment (p.s., an important read on "spirit animals"), I wonder about the creatures and critters who've kept you company while you write, kept you safe, kept you laughing.

This line again, from Berssenbrugge: "The principle of association moves me beyond an image to belief, and passion fixes my mind on Chaco."

Who or what is on your team to protect your poetry magic? I want you to set a timer for 15 minutes and make a list in your notebook: their names and descriptions.

And then, a question to ponder as you return to your day: How have those relationships shifted... deepened... changed your relationship to language?