This week’s poem is about a groundhog I saw this weekend. Here’s a photo as proof:

Consider the Groundhog

We walk through Mount Royal Cemetery,we two alone save for the thousands of bodiesand a plump, whistling groundhog.

The groundhog scurries into its burrow,then pops its head back out from a hole dug above a late-nineteenth-century coffin.

I wonder if the groundhog gnaws on the coffinto keep its incisors in check. I wonder if the groundhoghas ever reached bone. I wonder if the groundhoghas birthed litters within the safety of the coffin, fourblind chucklings nestled in the ribcage of a Fatherof Confederation.

My parents told me that Mount Royal is an extinct volcanobut that’s not true: there was magma once, but no lava.

Here are the connections to be made: we’ve come to the cemetery,a place of death, to be apart from other living people, whom we see as vectors of death due to the ongoing pandemic.In this cemetery, we find a living rodent unaware that its homeis among the dead. The cemetery is on a hill that I once thoughtwas dead, but was in fact never alive.

The groundhog’s fur is surprisingly resplendent, a gorgeous redwith a prismatic reflection in direct sunlight. The groundhog’s cryis resonant and pure, a pitch pipe played for a soprano.

Here are the questions to be asked: Who will make their homein the ribcage of the groundhog’s young? And what willthey tell their children of this home?

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