Beside the river in the dead of night,
a cry, and then another, like a spell,
turns the darkened beeches into light,
the silence of the woods into a bell;
and in the cottage on the moonlit hill
a woman shivers in her narrow bed
to hear the hare; and then the hare is still;
she feels its ginger paws against her head,
its dusty fur, like ghostly butterflies
that fall in winter from the curtain’s hand;
she feels it move; she hears its wild cries
glittering inside her ear like sand:
he’s lost inside the forest of her hair,
and finds, and steals, her mother’s kisses there.
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