Lapin - March 20 2025

 

Lapin

March 20 2025

I watched the long vertical incision.

The hand reaching in

and scooping out the guts

still warm with animal heat,

glistening

and dripping blood.

And then, held up by its feet

watching the skin cleanly stripped

in one smooth pull

all the way down;

fur in, flesh out,

as if peeling a banana

husking corn.

As if nature

had conveniently fashioned her prey

for human hands.

The rabbit,

reduced to meat

veined with white streaks of fat

wrapped in a thin translucent membrane

sheer as spider silk.

Dangling limply

and stripped of its fur

the thing seemed small;

hardly enough to satisfy

a working man.

Not worth the trouble

I thought to myself;

the pain and suffering,

the blood and sacrifice.

How matter of fact she was

handling a dead animal;

still warm,

still looking back

with two piercing eyes.

Which wasn’t a rabbit

anymore;

now, it was just a meal

for the two of us to share,

sautéed with mushrooms

and caramelized onions

on a bed of wild rice.

Accompanied by cheap red wine

in kitchen tumblers

poured from a box.

But before the meal

and before the limp carcass

there was the rabbit

I’d watched a few hours prior,

aiming its ears

with twitchy precision,

bounding over the field

with the dogs in its dust,

and cutting right, then left

with featherweight dexterity.

I am not a hunter.

I couldn’t dress a kill.

But I admired her skill

accepted her hospitality.

And with the guilt

of a soft-handed city boy

thanked the animal,

self-serving as that felt.

The dogs, who sat by the table drooling

lapped up the scraps

as if inhaling them.

No thanks or qualms,

no second thoughts.

This poem was inspired by the movie Dark River. This is a harrowing but brilliant story about the taciturn farmers of Yorkshire, their mean hard-working lives, and the dark side of family life in remote places. Even the arresting landscape becomes a character. The people live close to the land and close to their animals. Who are cared for, but treated unsentimentally: either as working animals, or simply as inputs and outputs.

One thing that stays with me is the depiction of manual labour. Literally, the work of hands, in lingering and intimate detail: shearing sheep, man-handling them by the horns, examining an injured one, gutting a rabbit. The last example from start to finish in close-up shots that spare nothing. The actor is the always outstanding Ruth Wilson, and she clearly is doing the work herself. She inhabits this character completely. With almost no dialogue, she brilliantly expresses her silent suffering and suppressed rage. In particular, her workman-like commitment to this scene makes it not only absolutely riveting, but also that much more believable.

(It’s good there’s little dialogue, because it’s almost unintelligible. The Yorkshire brogue is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Even the closed captions can be cryptic, full of the local idiom and specialized terms. But film is a visual medium, and in this movie the camera does most of the work.)

Non-hunters like me, who eat meat, prefer euphemism. Better not to think how the meat got here and where its from. So instead of cow, deer, and rabbit, we use words like beef, venison, and lapin (or, if instead of French it’s Italian cuisine, coniglio). Hence the title.