for Ciaran Carson
I closed my eyes on a white horse pulling a plough
In Poland, on a haystack built around a pole,
And opened them when the young girl and her lover
Took out of a perforated cardboard shoe-box
A grey rabbit, an agreeable shitty smell,
Turds like a broken rosary, the slow train
Rocking this dainty manger scene, so that I
With a priestly forefinger tried to tickle
The narrow brain-space behind dewdrop eyes
And it bounced from her lap and from her shoulder
Kept mouthing `prunes and prisms' as if to warn
That even with so little to say for itself
A silly rabbit could pick up like a scent trail
My gynaecological concept of the warren
With its entrances and innermost chamber,
Or the heroic survival in Warsaw's sewers
Of just one bunny saved as a pet or meal,
Or its afterlife as Hasenpfeffer with cloves
And bay leaves, onions - enough! - and so
It would make its getaway when next I dozed
Crossing the Oder, somewhere here in Silesia
(Silesian lettuce, h'm), never to meet again,
Or so I thought, until in Lodz in the small hours
A fat hilarious prostitute let that rabbit bop
Across her shoulders without tousling her hair-do
And burrow under her chin and nuzzle her ear
As though it were crooning `The Groves of Blarney'
Or `She Walked Unaware', then in her cleavage
It crouched as in a ploughed furrow, ears laid flat,
Pretending to be a stone, safe from stoat and fox.
From Michael Longley's new collection The Weather in Japan published this month by Jonathan Cape)