Mayday

and a bit of local phenology

Back when I was working, my route to the train took me through an underpass that had clearly cut through an aquifer, creating a permanent little bog or fen full of interesting plant and animal life. Poems resulted. This is one. I hope the Robert McCloskey children’s book of the epigraph is still as popular as it was in my childhood. I also hope that Haiti never again suffers an earthquake like the 2010 event recalled here.

Mayday

remembering “Make Way for Ducklings”

From the small safety of their storm-drain puddle,
two bird-brained birds
puzzle across four lanes at seven a.m. They bob and waddle
—there are no other words—
his iridescent head, green beyond mistaking,
blazing a way for her dull brown. Unhurried,
they preen at the midline, pecking
at air. I pause mid-step beside the roadway, worried,

because my childhood faith, set on the sacred texts
read to me, read to my children, still blessing the shelves
of the branch library, holds that some love protects
such innocent selves.
It wants a policeman to materialize,
whistling and gesturing with white-gloved hands.
Slim chance: in less benevolent guise,
he stands

above with radar gun, in dark blue interdiction
while cars bomb down the pavement toward our couple, forty-fiving
in a thirty zone. The gods of children’s fiction
appear not to be driving
this plot. (Do I expect them to hold sway,
or the grown-ups’ god, the Stillness in the Dance?
The Ground of Being, who let the ground give way
in Port-au-Prince?

Two bobbing question marks.)
Above the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue,
a chalk-white smudge of contrail arcs
across a sky by Watteau. Everything stills.
For now,

driver-attention holds, and brakes are firm and good.
Ducks cross in danger and care, those ancient, storied laws.
Early light spangles the cottonwood.
A flowering crab confettis its applause.

(first published in The Chimaera; appears in the book Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter)