Untitled ("They were whispering that she,")

A strange pursuit poem in which gossip, survival, and the paired shapes of entrance and exit turn the landscape into a moral trap.

The poem opens on gossip - 'They were whispering that she,' - immediately glossed by the speaker as 'that would be me', who 'was not necessarily doing it, / but definately looking around'. It then turns to groundhog-hunting as figure: you 'check the low root outlets' and 'snarl your way out of hell', and to 'the two / Like us / The entrance / and the exit', ending on 'a sandpaper / On a groundhogs shore' in 'the middle of nowhere'.

The hinge is the speaker's interruption of the gossip to claim the pronoun - 'that she, / that would be me' - so the poem is both overheard rumor and self-correction, the subject seizing the sentence others left dangling. The hunting passage doubles as a survival ethic: knowing the 'low root outlets', the ways to 'snarl your way out of hell', is the same skill as managing a reputation, finding the exits. The paired 'entrance / and the exit' becomes the poem's emblem of intimacy ('The ones we both / like the most') and of escape at once - every burrow, every relationship, defined by its two openings. The final image is deliberately obscure - 'sandpaper / On a groundhogs shore' - a rough, abrasive thing set at the edge of a hole 'in the middle of nowhere', leaving the trap half-named. This reading stays slightly provisional where the closing image resists literal sense.