Harebells

“Often I am permitted to return to a meadow . . . ”
—Robert Duncan

When I tell the story about the hare who appeared next to my father’s grave three days after we buried him—the hare with the gold-inflected eyes who sat next to me in the woodchips down in the dirt, the hare I heard first as a crackling sound in the red pines behind me, the hare who approached (I swear) with careful ceremony and kept a kind of vigil so close I could’ve leaned my head against its somber ear—I can’t ignore the seam left open in the telling, the wound in the timeline where the hare slips through the net of memory and stays with me.

Even now, as I write this, I catch my reflection transmitted back from the center of the hare’s eye, like a warning or a too realistic dream. My wordless grief witnessed and contained forever in hare-periphery, hare-consciousness.

*

Whenever I talk about the hare, I feel myself changed in the process. It’s like a fairy story, someone told me once. And I agreed too quickly, before I realized what they meant was something cute and sentimental, set in the foreclosure of a feminine key. The good daughter returns to bury her father and the forest animals befriend her and the trees of the field all clap their hands. Never mind that the hare appeared in the exact moment when grief had pushed me outside of language. Changeling daughter as vessel of failure, earthward, raging, fingers seeking rocks in the dirt.

*

If death is a mystery school, language is its first chrysalis. In other words, it’s easy to write about the romance of metamorphosis until metamorphosis, with its heaps of waste and wordlessness, offers itself to you. Asks you to adjust your frequencies to the vegetal world.

Notice, for instance, the bell-shaped petal growing in the dark where before there was no bell, no petal.

Learn the language of dreams, hares, flowers.

*

In the language of flowers common to the British Isles, harebells, also called Scottish bluebells, are thought to signify everlasting love and devotion, though their folklore ripples darkly with self-protective warnings and epithets: witch’s bells, dead men’s bells, witch’s thimbles.

Rhizomatic and slow-spreading, harebells grow in a surreal abundance, carpeting springtime meadows and forest clearings in otherworldly waves of violet-blue. They are also often placed around gravestones, having absorbed an extra valence of grief and mourning from their bluebell doppelgangers to the south.

Harebells take their exquisite corpse of a name from a conflation with hares common to the meadows where the wildflowers were likely to appear at the end of winter. Though in the old stories, the hares weren’t really hares but shape-shifting hags who hid among the flowers, evading capture by the men who feared their unseemly transformations. It was said that the flowers would ring as a warning when danger approached.

*

Devotion/death. Animal/object. Hare/hag. Grief/everlasting love. An inflorescence of slippages.

In one folkloric account, to walk through a meadow of harebells is to leave the other side irrevocably changed, though the precise nature of that change is always uncertain.

*

In ecological terms, to walk through a glen covered in harebells is to walk through what is most likely an ancient woodland, an undisturbed threshold where the present meets deep time.

Other thresholds beloved to harebells: hedgerows, meadows, rock-faces, dunes. Where life exists between worlds, harebells hold the soil in place with their creeping tap roots. They share their nectar with pollinators like digger bees, who thrive in the presence of harebells, reaching their long tongues fully into the heart of each blue well.

*

When my father died, I was living in Scotland, harebell country, where it’s still possible to walk through the woods on the spring equinox and stumble into a glen vibrating with dark blue and purple wildflowers. I often felt a vertiginous sensation in their presence that left me dizzy, unsteady on my feet. An anticipation of grief I didn’t recognize at the time.

I don’t remember seeing hares among the harebells, but I think of their absence now as its own shape-shifting presence, perhaps a harebellwether for the human-made catastrophes that have led to a worrying disappearance of wildflowers in recent years.

Somewhere unseen, a meadow is razed. A sea rises to eclipse the dunes. A record-setting heat wave burns milky-blue petals smaller than my thumbnail.

I think about the language of harebells in Celtic folklore, its ancestral wisdom on taboo and harm and protection: If you pluck a harebell from the ground, expect a string of bad luck to follow. If you trample a grove of harebells, the fairies will confuse your pathway home.

*

The hauntology of the meadow won’t let me off the hook, here in the realm where one lost future opens a portal to another. Where the language glitches, a seam is left open. One wound purples into another, up and down the stem of an old green timeline.

A seam, a gash, a wound. Just small enough for a hare to slip through.

*

The story goes like this: There was a living breathing hare who once appeared by my side at the edge of my father’s grave, and who now disappears at the center of everything I will ever write—like an ancient woodland, like a hag in hiding, like the lonely wag of a bee’s long tongue without its bell. How else to rewild my grief but to graft it into the memory of vanishing worlds, no matter how small or hidden? I am still learning to let language fail me, to permit the meadow to mourn with me and to witness each other in the process, to let myself be changed in the telling even as the story shape-shifts, too—where in a future version, the frequency finally reaches me, bells ringing from an ancient meadow as the hare slips away from the grave and back into the pines.