rabbitt rabbitt rabbitt!

It’s october!  Which I love.  Maybe only because it’s my birthday month, or maybe because it’s the best month of fall, who knows.

To welcome in October I would like to share two poems.  The first is one that Pat sent to me recently in our poem exchange.

 

Not to Be Dwelled On
by Heather McHugh

Self-interest cropped up even there,
the day I hoisted three instead of the
two called-for
spades of loam onto
the coffin of my friend.

Why shovel more than anybody else?
What did I think I’d prove? More love
(mud in her eye)? More will to work
(her father what, a shirker?) Christ,
I’d give an arm or leg
to get that spoonful back.

She cannot die again;
and I do nothing but relive.

 

and this one was sent to me by Ceci when I asked her if she’d read anything good lately:

 

Translations

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political

Adrienne Rich, 1972
From DIVING INTO THE WRECK (Norton, 1973)

 

One last thought: the title of this post, someone told me, is the first thing you’re supposed to say on the first day of a new month.  But rabbit always looks wrong to me; I prefer it with two t’s.