That's from Bryan Appleyard's essay "Poetry and the English Imagination."
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She used to check if I was home by looking through the crack in my door. I hadn't realized you could see that much through it. Finally she told me how she'd angle her head just right and peer through the split. See me sitting on my bed.
I don't know why I thought of that. I guess because it's secret, and poetry is secret. It's what you see through the crack...or it's what the crack sees through you. There you are on your bed, in light, blind to the fissure like a rabbit to the night.
I used to see that all the time at Omega. Walking back to our cabin in the dark, I'd invariably pass a rabbit tucked under a nightlamp, unseeing in the glare.
A baby rabbit sat in the road one night last spring as I drove home from my parents'. It was so small it should have been impossible. I stopped the car in the road (an extended driveway out of their development) and started towards it. Would I have to pick it up? Would that be the death of it, when the other rabbits smelled?
My approach did trigger its instincts. It ran, though in a scattered, "where now" way as opposed to the focused dive-for-cover of older and more experienced animals. It thought maybe further along the road, or no, maybe *back* along the road, or yes perhaps into the grass but *parallel* to the road, and finally, aha, into the grass *away* from the road. Towards the deep and the dark.
Back to the secret.
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"And so, like Hamlet," concludes Appleyard, "we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night."
