THE MALLARD IN MY POOL
If you only knew how
I wished I had your courage—
that ability to stand
stoically in the storm, un-
moved by the pounding rain, the
heady hiss of a strong soggy
wind, not a flounce in your feathers.
You turn to it as if it were
the summer sun—hey there
Sunshine—your blue-green face
bathing in the brooding clouds,
the clackety clack of drops
nearly hard as hail but still
rain. Still steady streaming rain.
I watch you through closed doors,
my nose flat against the streaked
glass, wishing I had your grace,
wishing I could slip as easily
into the pool and glide so
elegantly in the torrent—
as if it were nothing.
Oh, to plop myself in the midst
of a chaotic world without
worry, knowing I could always
fly away, find shelter somewhere!
How I would strut and swagger
naked in the squall, wagging my
tail feathers—so regal I am in the rain!
FUNERAL FOR A FROG
Single file we tread,
silently up the hill
like the ants we were then,
one-two, one-two, marching
hushed and determined
on a mound of brown grass
turning green.
Below, the little kids skip rope
on the cracked sidewalk,
singing merrily life but
a dream and for a moment,
we stop and watch them play.
The sprinkler rotates: tick-a-
tick, tick-a-tick, to the tinny
roll of a drummer’s beat,
tinkling over our sandaled
feet and splattering our
foreheads with an oiled water
oh so holy.
We blink as we pass, heads
high, hands clasped in reverie,
faces posed solemn and sad
like the ones on TV, watching
flag-draped coffins fade into
the static of a snowy screen.
We follow froths of petunias
and dry-mouthed impatiens, and
this time we don’t look back.
Not at the row of mini flags
muddied brown at the curb or
the oaks with their frayed yellow
ribbons flapping in the breeze.
We don’t see the cars that come
and go, the black limousine.
We march past trumpet lilies
keening in the warm wind, their
rusty tufts of pollen hanging
by threads unseen, unaware
of the coming rain, or how
with a whisper and a soft blow
there would be nothing left to flower.
Had I looked up I would have
noticed her—there
—do you see her?
sitting on the curb in her new
black dress, legs wide, fingers doodling
in the street sand?
—Do you see her
look of longing? Watching us as
her mother, her father, all
except of course her dead brother,
sidle into the limo? Her palm pressing
flat against the tinted glass
as if she could leave this
imprint, this part of her here, with us?
I didn’t.
I didn’t see her at all.
At eight and newly communed,
I wore my tiara like
a high priestess, my white-gloved
hands cradling a small satin
prayer book, white cape swishing
behind me in the summer
sun, behind the pallbearer
who carried the shoebox to
the open grave dug between two yews.
You see, I forgot, it was her frog too.
THE CLAM
I swallow you
whole, alive—
You a conscious
being, clinging
desperately to
the inner folds
of a life not
completely lived;
reluctant witness
to the side of me
I’ll never see,
and can only imagine.
Ours is a symbiotic
love, mutual
in its bounty—
like the blue-green
algae that lives
on your lips;
a give and take:
You eat me, I eat you.
But you know I need more.
So you surrender.
Slipping into the brine,
this pit of a cloistered soul
so desperate for your spirit.
You know what it means for me—
what I need—
to be whole. And what that means
for us.
FIRST LOOK
My daughter globs on mascara before
first class, unaware of the hanging man
swinging beside her front porch.
When she’s done
screaming, she phones me:
“Why, Mom?
Why that tree? Why me?”
“Not you,” I tell her. And then:
“Why not you?”
She knows dead. She’s seen the bloat of OD,
the bullet-bruised, peeled-back flap of
skin from the corpse her father has yet to put
together. But never
dead swinging; never
the weight of the pendulum ticking back and forth in
that prix fixe slice of time no one remembers ordering.
I don’t know if she noticed—
and she notices everything—
the way the wind might have nudged him or the putter
of squirrels scampering up and down the length of rope as it
swung, the same braided rope he clutched as he climbed
the embankment next to her first home away from
home. I can see her wet lashes, so long after the lengthening,
and those intense blue eyes that always flicker.
She didn’t hear that night what she always feared she’d hear:
not heavy boots on crunchy leaves; not the grunts of a man
as he hefted himself up the second-tallest tree.
She hadn’t known to be afraid.
“Why didn’t I hear him, Mom?” Her breath slows as we talk about
fear, about intention, about being in a place of
noticing. Silence takes on a long swaying rhythm, and she is a child
again in my arms rocking in the hammock in our yard.
It’s hypnotic breathing together like that.
HAWK AND SALAMANDER
Hawk grazes the burnished sky.
If it looks tentative it’s because the wind is tentative—
blowing hard, then giving up.
It’s that kind of day.
The bird hovers, floats really, just above where I lounge
by my parents’ pool—with the old people and their noodles,
bobbing up and down, smiling and tan.
Hawk scans the hot patio for food.
Salamander shrinks back into the camouflage,
two feet still on the concrete, maybe needing this
hardness as a reminder that it all—this all—
really is tentative. Maybe it remembers
having gills and that moment when it grew legs
and maybe the hawk remembers
its heaviness—oh back in the day—and
wanting very much to be carried
by this wind.
I, too, had gills. And webbed feet.
But not feathers. Not wings. Not yet.
With my hawk eyes,
I’m still searching and, with my little
reptile limbs, still hiding
in the brush.
Jacqueline Henry is a Long Island-based freelance writer and editor. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, The Southampton Review, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Clarion, After the Pause, The Cape Rock, Carbon Culture Review, Euphony, The North Atlantic Review, The Round, and Writer’s Digest magazine. She won first place in the 2009 Writer’s Digest Poetry Contest for her poem “The Undertaker’s Wife.” She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University, where she has taught creative writing.
