Today's poem is by Elinor Ann Walker

Meuse
       

          A river's name is also a way out.
I kept trying to find the word I was thinking of,
finding only the river; finally, the etymology, usage,
examples. From Middle French mucer, "to hide,"
maybe Italian, muccire, "to flee." Note similarity to
maze.
          In English dialect, meuse was the word
for any place that allowed a rabbit or hare
to escape, through a wall, a broken fence, a gap
in a hedge, an opening through which lithe limbs
could squeeze, where a small wind might whistle,
where a child could peer through,
hidey-hole.
          Photographer Sally Mann found solace
in the thought. In her memoir, she binds flight to safety,
redefines: a place a hare could bed down, its body
making space in rest, like a bowl. What's left behind,
in other words, after the rabbit has run. Childhood
memory of traipsing with my father, the meadow in
a vacant lot.
          "You have to know what you're looking for,"
he said. A hollow where grasses bend in a circle,
like a nest but on the ground. Warm when I pressed
a small hand down where something soft had lain
very still, that sense of having just missed it.
          The word is so close to muse. To
grief.

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Copyright © 2023 Elinor Ann Walker All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission