Salter's Hare

Mary Jo Salter’s narrator in “Hare” from her recent Open Shutters muses on the fact that she and the hare she sees from her kitchen window are merely players on the stage of life, “samples of [their] species.” They are both transitory beings. She looks from the window of the house lived in only a year, and he comes at odd times, typical of his species “harum-scarum.” She first claims ownership of the “green proscenium” onto which he hops, but then reasons that she is really only the warden as he “breaks out of his warren.” She sees him to be a “hunted vagrant.”

The narrator assigns gender assuming that he is male, that he dreams “of his harem” and describes the rabbit in terms that are dominantly masculine. She assumes the warren is his and that he is “promiscuous,” noting that he “inserts himself within/ a low bush, like a lover.” Earlier, he is described as a knight on a chess board.

As a transitory image, he “leaps as fast as Aesop/ claimed his kind could leap.” When he eats he moves slowly like “a silent, smooth lawn mower,” but at other times he is compared to the jet set waiting in line at the airport. In contrast, the narrator stays “put inside the house.”

But there are other ways in which narrator and hare are similar. They are both “bad at faces” and she in her own way shares his promiscuous or mixed nature. The narrator suspects that they share a similar fate. She wonders, “will either of us be missed?” The dishes she washes are compared to “shards for the archeologist.”

When she questions whether she is seeing the same hare or a different one, she raises the whole question of individual identity, a question that lies just below the surface of the entire meditation of the poem. Life is fleeting and when it’s all said and done, is there really very much that can be said to distinguish one life from another?