"Be careful of the little bones"

Rabbit in tomato sauce, as a child
in front of a heaven of fields, in a kitchen
with the window on vineyards, granddad at lunch
with a glass of his own homemade wine.
Light red, full of summer sun.
Full of my gaze.
The past. What’s gone.
Vivid because it can’t be retrieved.
Except for sentences like this:
“Be careful of the little bones”.
At lunch, all of us,
sucking and slurping to the sky,
it was from grandma I think I heard
the first time, these words to granddad,
words like breaths in the haze of time.

And now on an evening a few days ago,
a cousin I hadn't met for ages
cooked rabbit… so ”the little bones…
“careful..”

Maybe the eternal present streams
in words like a mountain spring,
utterance is all.

And words
and “the little bones”
are the same thing.