Rabbit Song

I smell that you
are chasing me with your eyes,
and I leave my scent behind
so that you may know the joy of
my leaping / if only for ignorance
of what a stone feels.

My only conquest
is to break the grasses down;
not to diminish them but
encourage them by chewing
their stalks to a pulp.
I eat what nobody wants
and leave their digested remains behind
in your overgrown pasture.

How do I survive;
this is how, and why --

I am light as air, I think,
and the ways of the world don't
collect in my fur or between my toes
where my nails claw loose dirt
agitating microbes to no real
transformation.

I have no more to do with
what purpose surrounds me
than what I had brought
to those streamlined channels
I created and memorized:

They will close behind me
              when I leave;
Winter will erase my existence for a time
and I'll become transience
itself.

Somewhere else;
I will burrow and outlive the frosts
to be remembered in Spring as
the tenacious one who never really tries
even in the patterns of
grassroots which become all
I can truly exist for.

       .....