Wildlife

Lyrics

I know when it doesn't flinch at my arrival, that the rabbit in my front yard is dead. I knew this under yesterday's sun, when the rabbit tried to move and could do nothing but stare at me, drowning in my merciful shadow. I have returned today to see that my home has found death, or that death has found the shadow I fled to. The rabbit is so small, the grass has barely bothered to part for it. I wonder if it will do the work for me, and pull the rabbit into itself. I've seen a street do that. I've seen small creatures left on a sidewalk, their bodies elongated and still until someone confirmed that they would never pull the world into their lungs again, and then they were gone, as if the concrete had not been fed. But it is insatiable, the tar and the earth and the blood it demands. I find a shovel, because it is still hot out, and my daughter will want to play here. I assume we all dance among the dead, especially if we don't know any better. I do not want her to see the rabbit like this, where the rabbit is no longer a thing as opposed to a thing left behind, but I do not want her to not see it either, as I don't know when someone she loves will leave something behind that she no longer recognizes. And isn't this what I went to college for? To buy a home in a place where my daughter can learn about death from small animals instead of classmates? I learned that animals flee a scarier thing unless they have forgone fear or are already dead, because one time a police officer told us to stop, and we ran into the arms of a new night, except for Big Kevin, who must not have been scared, or was already dead, either way, the next day, he was still on the sidewalk, and the day after that he was gone. I do not know if the cracks of his burial took him in or who was assigned the shovel. My father told me that I didn't have to go to Kevin's funeral if I didn't want to and that someday we would move to a neighborhood where this doesn't happen. But it is too late to teach me about what gets left behind. I am still afraid of what may find me though I no longer flinch.