Outside my picture window, a jack rabbit
stakes his claim to the brush
I stacked last fall for winter burning.
Circling his thatched hut of cottonwood limbs,
the loop he’s made in new snow
looks like the imprint of an 8-plait
lariat a cowboy laid
around his camp in desert sand
to fence off rattlers.

During boyhood autumns, snowshoe rabbits turning
white before first snow, I’d climb
the backs of brush piles
heaped all summer to Uncle Hank and Dad
logging their hardwood forties
with horses. I’d bounce on bowed legs—
feet set in the forks of branches—standing
ahorseback like a trick rider,
or a silver screen cowboy hero
leaping from singletree to singletree
to retrieve the reins of a runaway
six-hitch stage. Riding full gallop,
I’d flush for Uncle and Dad
a trapshoot of panicked rabbits
and revel in the smell of the gunpowder West.

The rest of my life I spent loving
the hunt, until I caught myself
grieving over a lop-eared pet,
Hopalong, who died in my arms
without the Hollywood romance
of a heart-shot partner. Today, my father
snowshoes into his forty with feed
for the animals he names
as once he named each gun
mothballed now in cubbyholes
of the hunting shack. He’s learned
how we suffer double when lives we take
come back. Under a jacklight moon,
tonight I’ll set a circle of carrots,
root tips upright, vigil wicks
flickering from snowdrifts
around my house. The rabbit’s braided track,
should morning bring magic and luck,
will figure-8 his home with mine,
keeping us both safe from snake and flame.

From Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat (OreanaBooks, 2003) and Tracks (The Kutenai Press, 1989)
© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.

title page for Tracks, 1989