45 minutes
neighborhood with Scott and Delia
48 degrees
No sun today so it felt cooler. Mud and puddles mixed with bare grass. Noticed some bright green moss at the base of a tree. It was nice to take a walk with Scott; we haven’t done an afternoon walk like this in months.
a Rabbit recap*
*which is a summary, not a redux (revival). Rabbit Redux is the second book in John Updike’s series about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom The first book is Rabbit Run, which I just checked out of the library.
This morning I reviewing all of my entries tagged, “rabbit” and seeing what I can find.
1 — 2 june 2019
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean
(The Mending Wall/ Robert Frost)
What a wonderful first line! The rabbits and the gaps — I wrote about this a few days ago in my rabbit eyes section. I am less interested in going down rabbit holes and more in exploring rabbit peripheries, in the shadows, on the edges, in the unnoticed corners. For me, this isn’t about hiding-as- prey, but about dwelling on the edges, near the exits and the entrances to other places.
2 — 20 aug 2020
Listen to the black capped chickadee’s 2 note song.
Can you hear him posing a question to the gorge?
Can you hear the honking geese overhead?
Can you hear your lungs grasping for air
and the green leaves thickening as they hold us?
Can you hear the chainsaw start, the tight weave
of the savanna’s oak unraveling?
It’s August, thick, crowded. Listen
to the path, cluttered with acorns. Listen
to the sewer stink near the ravine, the sex-crazed
gnats swarming the hill. Can you hear
the virus spreading through the neighborhood?
Can you make a noise like a panicked rabbit? There are
sounds your tweet lacks names for.
(Homage poem to Helen Mort / Sara Lynne Puotinen)
Rereading this poem from that first pandemic summer, another word popped into my head: cornered, as in Can you make a noise like a cornered rabbit? Which is better? Not sure. I like this poem; maybe I should do something more with it? Maybe that something should involve hybrid writing about that summer? And maybe I should return to Mary Oliver’s Long Life for inspiration?
3 — 24 april 2020
Lisa Olstein’s unrabbited woods in “Dear One Absent This Long While.” Yours is the name the leaves chatter/at the edge of the rabbited woods. So good! I memorized this poem five years ago; I need to refresh my memory. Just did!
4 — 24 feb 2020
A cup holds
sugar, flour, three large rabbit breaths of air
(My Weather / Jane Hirshfield)
I love imagining how much air is 3 large rabbit-breaths worth. How big is this rabbit? And, in general, how big are rabbit breaths (from the 2020 entry)? Yes! A rabbit’s breath! I should look it up. Googled “rabbit breathing” and this listing of a rabbit’s vital signs1 came up first:
- A rabbit’s body temperature should ideally be between 101.5°F and 104.2°F.
- The normal respiratory rate for rabbits ranges from 30-60 breaths per minute.2
- A healthy rabbit’s heart rate averages 205 and has a resting range from 180-350 beats per minute.
While sifting through links, including watching a brief video on how bunnies apologize to each other — they touch heads, and if the other bunny doesn’t accept the apology, they run away,3 I read a line about how rabbits are very smart mammals and then this: “The rabbit is commonly used as a laboratory animal for inhalation toxicology tests” (source). I wondered, do rabbits feel pain? “Rabbits have the same neurophysiological mechanisms as humans to produce pain and therefore have the same capacity to feel pain as humans” (source). How awful!
A few more random breathing facts: rabbits breathe through their noses; respiratory issues are a main cause of death; if a rabbit is healthy, their breath should not stink.
I didn’t have any luck when I googled, ” how big is a bunny breath,” but since they breathe a lot per minute, I imagine it’s fairly small. In the middle of writing this sentence I looked up “rabbit lung capacity.” One of the, People also ask, was, Are rabbit lungs good for dogs? The answer, “High-value: Rabbit Lung is considered a super food due to its nutritional composition,” comes from a site selling rabbit lung treats.
All of these results are reminding me of a line from yesterday’s research about how rabbits are unique in their position as both beloved pet and food source.
5 — 21 may 2023
This
is a poem in which no chickens will die. A rabbit
will bound across the road and the car will slow
in time. The fox will discover the trampoline behind
the house next door and with it the wonder of flight.
Everyone I love will live and call me after supper
to say goodnight.
(What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine/ K.T. Landon)
I discovered this poem from a poetry person on twitter. It was part of their running list of “Not Today, Satan” poems. Have I ever noticed a rabbit road kill? I must have, but I don’t remember it. Near me, it’s mostly squirrel or raccoon roadkill. Anyway, I love this poem so much that I might need to memorize it. And, like I wrote in this 2023 entry, I might need to create my own “Not today, Satan” list!
6 — 15 april 2023
these are the
going closures that organize mind, allowing
and limiting, my mind’s ways: the rabbit’s
leaps and halts, listenings, are prosody of
a poem floating around the mind’s brush
(garbage / A.R. Ammons
This! For today’s entry, I only posted the rabbit part, but the rest of the excerpt I posted on april 15 is wonderful too. All about motion and our interactions with the land/our surrounding and how they shapes our motions. The halts and leaps and listenings of a rabbit as it responds to its surroundings — the terrain, predators, the weather. These are the rhythms and sounds of a poem (prosody) — not a poem on the page, but a poem in the flesh, a poem that is a living and breathing and moving creature being made by and making the world. So good! I say, I am a poem. A rabbit is a poem. Any and all of us who move through the world, responding to its winds and rivers and storms, is a poem!
- In a footnote, there’s a link to a pdf comparing vital signs of several different animals ( ↩︎
- The average human’s breathing rate (whatever average means here) is 12 – 25 breaths per minute. I’m not going to try counting mine because that would stress me out too much. I don’t want to think about breathing; I just want to keep doing it! ↩︎
- From another more reliable source (reliable = trained expert, cites sources), I discovered that this head touching idea is from the 2018 movie, Peter Rabbit. According to the Bunny Lady, rabbits might groom each other after a disagreement. But this begs the question, why do bunnies disagree? What does a bunny argument look like? ↩︎
Get Out ICE
Protest art around the cities:
The banners, flags and posters can be seen in storefronts and porch windows, on telephone poles and electrical boxes, in neighborhoods across the metro area. They are part of an explosion of art made in response to ICE’s presence that has included protest songs, comics and zines and coloring books, snow and ice sculptures, stickers and buttons and whistles 3D-printed in every color of the rainbow.
Winning Hearts and Minds
Through this article, I found out about Heart Your Art and their ICE OUT posters and this event tonight at the Witch’s Hat:
This Wednesday, The ICE OUT Protest Posters take over the Witch’s Hat Water Tower for a one night outdoor projection.
Instagram post
.
Large scale. Public. After dark.
One of the posters from Heart Your Art struck a chord with me. The poster says, Believe Your Eyes, and it features the text in big block letters in the top half with two open eyes below it, and then a quote from George Orwell in smaller text at the bottom: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and your ears. It was their final, most essential, command.”
In the description of the poster, the artist writes:
It is important now, more than ever, to believe your eyes. You know what happened. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. The narrative is trying to sway you — to make you question yourself. You know the truth!
I deeply appreciate all of these posters and the artists who are designing them. I also agree with the call to resist the double-speak of the Trump administration and to never stop challenging the lies they present as truth.
And, I struggle with the privileging of sight and eyes as (the most) pure and reliable truth tellers. Eyes are not always reliable, and not just for people like me with low vision. As I’ve mentioned before on this log, eyes are not just cameras sending pictures to the brain. There is filtering and guessing and selective seeing — some things are seen, some ignored, some the brain filters out.
You might argue that this is not the point here and I would agree and disagree. Yes, there is a bigger message here about resisting manipulation and calling out fascist propaganda and trusting your own experiences of events. And yes, the inaccurate promotion of seeing/eyes as the way to access the truth, is easily manipulated by those in power. In the era of AI and the altering of images in such convincing ways that even my husband — whose attention to detail and nose for sniffing fakery out is very impressive — has been fooled, relying on eyes is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.
So, what would I like the poster to say instead? I’ll have to think about that; maybe I’ll try to collaborate with Scott on my own version? A preliminary response: Believe Your Eyes and Your Ears — which is what Orwell’s quote does; it’s not just looking/seeing but hearing and listening. I’m not satisfied with that as the solution, but I’ll leave it for now. I’ve already written abouteyes and witnessing on this log in different contexts, and I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again.
New Yorker experiment #3
Today’s experiment comes from a book review in the 25 august 2025 issue titled “Me, Myself, and I.”
text:
1
point to
sentences
sliced in half
askew
wile
with strangeness.
Stutter
just enough to let in the surreal.
Occupy who knows where
stay
vague improbable
2
swap the dead-eyed liturgy of
doomed
vision
with
shadow
thoughts: Again, find markers that work before I start using them. Also, the second poem needs arrows but I didn’t know how to do that with the blackout. And, I wanted to add another word to shadow: reinvention, but I accidentally colored over it. Oops.