Reading The Machine in the Garden While Billy Mows the Lawn

with debts to Leo Marx, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen

Death, too, is in Arcadia. Outside, Billy labors
the push mower over the backyard’s topography, lunar
with moles, the false hills that give way to the craters
of their homes. I saw one once, alive—the only other
I’ve ever seen was lifeless inside a bag of potting soil—
squelching out from his hole and then flattening to glide
and disappear beneath the mower—a bygone mower,
a nice and easy walk-behind stolen from the driveway
some afternoon in spring. Now we have only this

onerous thing, though it makes, briefly, a decent retreat
of the pocked and patchy grass. And anyway Leo Marx
says there is a difference between a pastoral design and
a pastoral ideal, between a pastoral poem and a pastoral
dream. Which is this? Late last night, I was awakened 
from a poem by a hideous sound, like a baby cry-cackling
in the braying dark.

Once,         then a stretch of silence,         then again.

I was reading Wilfred Owen. “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
I was imagining war. Or I was reading Isaac Rosenberg.
“Break of Day in the Trenches.” I was imagining a rat—
droll rat. I was imagining the war. The world was pierced

first by the unseen animal’s keening, then by my dog,
my vigilant little sentinel, barking to be let loose
upon the sound. I followed her out into the sunken
yard’s sucking dark, where I saw only shadows and so
looked upward to have a moment with the moon.
Droll moon, they would shoot you if they knew

your cosmopolitan sympathies. Not that they haven’t tried—
anyway. There I was, another poet looking, looking
at the moon, when I noticed Frankie looking, nosing
with insistence along the fence the same patch of high
grass the mower misses, and so I’d missed him there,
the rabbit       caught in the grid of welded wire. All spring
the yard’s been full of them, and once Billy nearly caught one
in the mouth of the mower, the other, better mower,
and the critter sat so still by the stoop we’d feared him hurt,
but eventually          he hopped away.

Was this the same rabbit? He was stuck bad.
He’d tried so hard to get through he’d half
skinned himself, and his flayed furless haunches
quivered red, and the uncut grass that had misled him
rustled, freckled red. On the phone, animal control said
they’d have to kill him if dispatched. I said, Is it ethical
to let him go like this? All messed up like he is? I could almost
hear the man shrugging on the other end. He said,
I donno, ma’am. Bunnies get killed all the time.

And so they do. He had more wounds not made
by his own struggle, a dot of blood marking the spot
where his tail went missing. (It lay now by the fence,
costume-ish, garishly cartoonish.) Some predator,
to carry the rabbit off, had also tried to pull him through.
An owl, I presume—I woke one night to the hoots
before dropping softly back to unthreatened dreams.

So I hung up on the city’s bunny killer, called Billy home.
I sang the rabbit songs while I waited, It’s okay, 
it’s okay, it’s okay, little bunny. He ceased to struggle,
either calmed or petrified. I must have sounded like
death come singing.

Billy pried apart the wire and gently fed the rabbit’s
stillness through the grid. We thought to keep him
overnight, in Frankie’s old crate, wait until light to call
someone who cared about bunnies, however often
they get killed, a wildlife rescue maybe, and while
we thought on that, the rabbit                            hopped away, 
first under the van

and then into the drive’s weed-choked side, where once
a raccoon fell from a high snag’s homey belly, hit
the fence and started dying, finished up soon after
animal control came around. It is a mercy sometimes,
I know, and I said that to Billy while we smoked out front

on the porch, trying to come down from the bunny
business. Suddenly, shots slurred from a quarter mile off,
maybe near the park—a machine gun, it sounded like,
something automatic. Poppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppop. Then
quiet. The deep-down kind known only after some raucous
violence. That’s when the rabbit             returned, leaping across
our yard to the next, pausing to glint, to look at us, slick,
sick-red as a moonlit poppy, as if to say—What, exactly?