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Cleaning the Rabbit Cage
The round, brown, uniform, odorless turds
like diminutive canon balls piled
in a tidy corner
are identically unidentical,
no two exactly alike,
like snowflakes. I’m shoveling them
into the urine-soaked newspaper,
examining one and then another
between my thumb and forefinger:
individual, fungible, fudgy,
yet in the aggregate
a perfect whole, a dusting,
a few errant pellets spilling
onto the floor as I gingerly
remove the mother lode.
And what must he think, Pepper,
masticating in the opposite
corner, knowing enough not to
shit where he eats, even in such close
quarters? What must he think,
he who always seems to be thinking,
chewing things over and over
with his two sets of incisors,
one behind the other,
seeming to pay me no mind,
yet surely noticing me here,
my head inside his cage,
harvesting his excrement,
as though I were of a mind
to make something out of it?
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