The Mimbres ancients buried family skeletons
prone underneath their pueblo household floors
with broad ceramic bowls inverted over skulls interred
eye sockets upward below their earthen domes,
the inner face a painted hemisphere of art
for blind eternity, a hole punched through the center
of the bowl chosen, fulfilling custom, letting
the breath escape the broken clay, the image, the design.
A lunar rabbit bends a quarter turn
round this one's vacant middle, the winking crow perched halfway
down his backbone beaks the nearest of four pair
of ribs, their cartoon crescents all the remains
of the hare's hindquarters, his waning orb half eaten by the bird
pecking clean the knuckles of his spine—
this fifth moon rabbit, Hare of the May, his good eye cocked
off center at the bottom of a punctured bowl
and grizzled whiskers quiz the solar scavenger
fastened on his shoulder blade, talons in the quick,
in his still gaze outward serenity
a bemused whisper, “… sister quail, brother fish …”