Tableau

Because I never saw the butcher take down even one skinned rabbit
from the line hung in the window, I did not believe

that somewhere up the road was a crowded hutch
in which they huddled. I did not picture the soft ears

laid flat while a hand groped into the straw-dusted recesses.
Nor did I as I might expect allow the image of steam rising from a shallow white bowl

or those slim flanks braised on a plate with parsley sprigs and spring potatoes. I looked
at the rabbit-shaped bodies suspended on silver hooks

in the clear shelf of the window, the pane wiped clean I guess
each evening, and the sun bright on the glass

in which was reflected the wispy boulevard trees just now blossoming
above the passers-by, and saw across the street three blue awnings

blurred with sky, their flapping
like a flash of something disappearing fast into tall grasses.  

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She has poems recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume, Tishman Review, Sugarhouse Review, Baltimore Review, and others. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.