Autumn Switch

Autumn. Leaves are whirling from poplar borders
and my grandfather has shot a rabbit for dinner.
“Poor rabbit.” Nurse-like, my sister blushes over the shoebox
where the furry wretch sucks shot from its paw.
This one, soon to be pulled, cannot be saved
in her private clinic—will she keep pulling its leg
or its spirit, or just her own?
Gramps is old school. One’s shelter is the stomach.
Anything else they can take from you,
and rabbit is full of lean but warming nourishment.
He is my favorite grandparent, who kindly surfed
the same zone with me for marked time.
He rightfully assumed I would be on top of my rabbit portion.
A minor rite, while there are so many more egregious massacres.
My mother plays solitary Mikado with the bones.
Her own body would quite stiffen, become a dried-up drum,
at the southern dialect that my grandfather addressed me in,
cocking his head and saying ey for what do you think.
As the rabbit is being abducted through our digestive systems,
we pray for donations of nature. Renew
what you can, autumn, at least dart a few dandelions,
scoot fluff bunnies over the barren furrows.
Nature, we don’t mind if you make us toil, but nurture us.
Opa, I finished my shank. I don’t need to throw up, thanks.
Grandpa says thou for you, at ease and friendly with
   earth’s associates.
The weather is his home and in his orchard he grows his tongue;
wherever he travels he branches out in unfamiliar expressions,
chinks up vowels from the straight oral passage.
My mother, though taller by half a head, is a city mouse beside him.
She scolds me for grammar, and my father,
caught in this split, shuts up.
When the rifle has finished playing its part,
my father puts it away to rust in the garage,
I often eye it there, an alien tool lording it
over the abraded hammer, the dust-gathering sandpaper,
the guinea pig–chewed extension cords, and the emergency lights:
a relic not shedding any scrap of its meaning,
while it bites on its baby bullet like a voracious snake.
My father swears never to use it.
He never has, and I have no idea which tradition he consulted
when he beat the twirling leaves out of me
which would give rise to another story.
Since my opa has keeled over his shoebox, lots of silly bunnies
run wild in the dark days. I say thou and thanks.