A Vowel Too

 vowal II ––  A Vowel Too

Two faces greet you at your door:

It’s Janus, god of thresholds:

Looking aft and looking fore

To deeds recalled and dreams foretold.

And Janus cackles and he sighs,

“Two faces have I:

One to laugh and one to cry.”

Revising the godhead’s Profiles in Fear,

You came, you saw, you conquered.

Tenure was yours within a year;

You planned to stay much longer.

Your Ph.D. no longer flogging,

You happily commenced with jogging.

Every morning, dressed in white,

You’d bound down nature’s pathways.

With Cal accoutrements bedight,

Eschewing phantom speedways,

One day solo, the next with a companion,

You’d course the Fire Trail of Strawberry Canyon.

Mindful of the use of time,

Consecrating a daily habit,

Trading your watch for a sundial sublime,

You tarried as fondly as Alice’s rabbit.

I’m late! I’m late!

For a very important date

And lest you think this gambit funny–

Disinclined to squeeze a tear–

Remember that the Easter Bunny

Has had a very tricky year.

No time to say hello, good-bye!

Ah, Tempus fugit! I must fly.

Like Alice tumbling after aforesaid rabbit,

E. Bunny hurtled down a hole,

Daft as some medieval abbot

Praying for Persephone’s soul;

While back on the surface of the black Earth,

Awaiting springtime’s green rebirth

A circle of devoted friends,

Anticipating E. B.’s emergence,

Recited his virtues once and again,

Optimizing his resurgence.

That you were late’s a certainty:

Late for a Date with Destiny.

And soon enough he reappeared

None the worse for wear;

Wet nose, whiskers, tips of ears:

E.B. still looked quite debonair.

Destiny’s not considered funny–

Unless you happen to be E. Bunny.

A little ruffled, a little flustered,

Wondering where the time had gone,

E. Bunny his rabbity troops did muster

For fulfillment of tasty orders anon.

Orders for eggs in woven baskets

Yellow and green: a-tisket, a-tasket

Then, ‘Where have you been?’ his friends demanded:

‘Have you been on a Journey to the Center of the Earth?’

On what subterranean beachhead had he landed?

In what deep ravine had he found rebirth?

Eggs dyed red and spackled pink,

Decorated with indelible ink

Too busy to answer, E. Bunny was cagey:

Instructing his troops on deliveries to make,

Conducting himself less shrewdly than sagely,

He hinted at mosses and grasses to take.

Then he gathered the denizens of Watership

And spoke to them of days of yore,

Of human rites and magic trips

And centuries of rabbit lore:

How humans formed a sacrificial habit

Involving goats and birds and rabbits.

E.B., himself a sublimation,

Required these deliveries of the Rabbit Nation;

For every chocolate bunny appearing on Easter Sunday––

While seeming little more than innocent child’s’ play––

Rescued a rabbit from becoming a ‘pet’––

––a ball of fur to be handled to death.

What’s more, archeology from human habitations

Showed evidence of rabbit-based rites; such excavations

Revealed love-cults among the Ancient Greeks

Where cuddles for humans were wrought from rabbit shrieks.

There lover courted lover with the gift of a hare,

And rabbits dwelling on the isles hadn’t a prayer.

But let us leave E.B. behind,

And Alice’s White Rabbit too,

Let us return to the dreaming mind:

And  to our story – the story of you.