Coming to Terms
A pair of crows swoop down on a young rabbit.
Wings explode, furred hind legs kick high.
I throw a stone to disrupt the hunt, for now.
Local crows also dive bomb my husband.
They do not like his baseball cap.
Remember faces. Are not fans of masks.
What would they make of a Plague doctor’s
leather top hat, black robes and the beaked mask
filled with herbs against miasmas? Would they
recognize it as Corvid-like or might it merely
appear monstrous? More than a character in
Commedia dell Arte, plague doctors donned early
PPE, let blood, witnessed wills, counted dead bodies.
Later, we drive by crows pecking at roadkill—
a cottontail chased onto asphalt. I sigh. Breathing in,
imagine the savory scent of rosemary and juniper.
My husband tugs at his cap. We drive on.
*
Rhett Watts has poems in Sojourners Magazine, The Worcester Review, Canary, Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Lyric, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review among others and in the book The Best Spiritual Writing 2000. She won the CT Poetry Award and the Rayne Arroyo Chapbook Award for No Innocent Eye. Her books of poems are: Willing Suspension (Antrim House Books) and The Braiding (Kelsay Books). Rhett facilitates writing workshops in CT and MA and lives feet from a brook with her husband and Maine Coon cat.
