10 Ways of Looking at a Hare
The idea was taken from ‘13 ways of looking at a blackbird’, by Wallace Stevens. The 10 sketches were drawn on the iPad and watercoloured.
POEM:
10 ways of looking at a hare
1.
Up the Hare Walk
to a brown field, a brown hare
lying low, raising a chiselled snout
above a parapet of early wheat.
We choose our own quest.
2.
Pale as bleached bone
in a saint’s reliquary –
numinous. We want to touch,
to believe in it.
3.
The eye of the moon is the
glint of the hare
just as ethereal
his sideways look, startled,
his roving lighthouse stare.
4.
Leaping over the dry-stone wall.
A question in that canny eye
‘See me on my dusk run?’
tacking across the wave
of green shoots.
5.
When their blood is up
they are Irish in a brogue of fisticuffs
and furry breeches.
March weather has its uncertainties,
a hare’s eye turns one season at a time.
6.
His winter totem
white, sacred, rare.
Furtive as the arctic fox,
brisk as the snow wolf –
the Snowshoe hare.
7.
The dancing hare, a dandy
in his drab frock-coat,
tunes in – one ear glows red
catching the light,
the other a furry
exclamation mark.
8.
Between earth-lore and mystery
is the eccentric hare,
whose expressive ears lie flat,
waiting that moment of madness.
9.
Look, he says, I know what it is
to be the wilderness,
the lifeguard of a landscape
and to inhabit it
under the wheeling sky.
10.
The hare has the heart of an Olympian,
sprinter, boxer, courser,
high jumper, track and fielder,
tumbling like a stone.
Then curled like an ammonite,
feral and fossil together.