The Rabbit Catcher

It was May. How had it started? What

Had bared our edges? What quirky twist

Of the moon’s blade had set us, so early in the day,

Bleeding each other? What had I done? I had

Somehow misunderstood. Inaccessible

In your dybbuk fury, babies

Hurled into the car, you drove. We surely

Had been intending a day’s outing,

Somewhere on the coast, an exploration—

So you started driving.

What I remember

Is thinking: She’ll do something crazy. And I ripped

The door open and jumped in beside you.

So we drove West. West. Cornish lanes

I remember, a simmering truce

As you stared, with iron in your face,

Into some remote thunderscape

Of some unworldly war. I simply

Trod accompaniment, carried babies,

Waited for you to come back to nature.

We tried to find the coast. You

Raged against our English private greed

Of fencing off all coastal approaches,

Hiding the sea from roads, from all inland.

You despised England’s grubby edges when you got there.

The day belonged to the furies. I searched the map

To penetrate the farms and private kingdoms.

Finally a gateway. It was a fresh day,

Full May. Somewhere I’d brought food.

We crossed a field and came to the open

Blue push of sea-wind. A gorse cliff,

Brambly, oak-packed combes. We found

An eyrie hollow, just under the cliff-top.

It seemed perfect to me. Feeding babies,

Your Germanic scowl, edged like a helmet,

Would not translate itself. I sat baffled.

I was a fly outside on the window-pane

Of my own domestic drama. You refused to lie there

Being indolent, you hated it.

That flat, draughty plate was not an ocean.

You had to be away and you went. And I

Trailed after like a dog, along the cliff-top field-edge,

Over a wind-matted oak-wood—

And I found a snare.

Copper-wire gleam, brown cord, human contrivance,

Sitting new-set. Without a word

You tore it up and threw it into the trees.

I was aghast. Faithful

To my country gods—I saw

The sanctity of a trapline desecrated.

You saw blunt fingers, blood in the cuticles,

Clamped around a blue mug. I saw

Country poverty raising a penny,

Filling a Sunday stewpot. You saw baby-eyed

Strangled innocents, I saw sacred

Ancient custom. You saw snare after snare

And went ahead, riving them from their roots

And flinging them down the wood. I saw you

Ripping up precarious, precious saplings

Of my heritage, hard-won concessions

From the hangings and transportations

To live off the land. You cried: ‘Murderers!’

You were weeping with a rage

That cared nothing for rabbits. You were locked

Into some chamber gasping for oxygen

Where I could not find you, or really hear you,

Let alone understand you.

In those snares

You’d caught something.

Had you caught something in me,

Nocturnal and unknown to me? Or was it

Your doomed self, your tortured, crying,

Suffocating self? Whichever,

Those terrible, hypersensitive

Fingers of your verse closed round it and

Felt it alive. The poems, like smoking entrails,

Came soft into your hands.