Gate
By Robyn Schiff
Everyone has a cousin Benjamin Bunny.
Peter said a walk would do him good.
The edge of the wood. Peter did not
enjoy himself anymore. He never would
again. The brooding lettuces
in their falcon hoods. The coppice gate
wound shut by weeds, the jaws of life
trying to keep it closed tight
but anyone can climb it.
As a child I played on a gate
in a neighborhood park
that swung of itself
and sounded like the distress
call of a rabbit. I stood on the bottom slat
and backed in and out of
the air. I’ll never get out of here.
The gate was pure folly, without
fencing on either side,
Greek tragedy
staged around a doorway
the imagination strains to enter.
I was raised in an aisle seat
with an eye line of an actor
about to come through
from behind it. Melodramatic
onions grew wild.
I cried and cried until someone said
it’s okay to cry,
it means the onions
are fresh. Every dream begins
with a threshold.
Meat in the driveway
where dogs tipped the garbage.
Where’s your mouth? There is a whistle
you can buy that makes the sound
of a rabbit screaming
hunters use to call
whatever they want
out of the thicket
because everything they want
wants rabbit for dinner.
Move your hand
along the shaft to change
the call from jack to cotton-
tail and back again.
Once you see them nose
out of the interior at your bidding
what stops you from sounding
every single day? All day? The shrill
imagined rabbit’s
canned terror. You can do it
with a reed of grass. Cup your hands.
Everything alive
is listening. I knew a hunter
who could do a spot-on fawn
whose suffering
would bring a doe
into the open every time.
He didn’t want a doe, though.
He wanted a buck.
Here’s what I can’t stand
to acknowledge:
when bucks hear
the sound of the fawn
my friend makes with his mouth
they come, too, not in pity, but in lust,
so badly they want the doe
drawn by the yearning
of a fawn in need of her.
Everything is within range
suddenly, and who am I to judge.
He mounts her relief
and spring comes.
No. He takes
a bullet. I was caught
up in theatrics
and forgot whose
theater this is.
Robyn Schiff, "Gate" from A Woman of Property. Copyright © 2016 by Robyn Schiff. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Source:
A Woman of Property
(Penguin Books, 2016)
