The Duck that Passed Before Me

I went outside today to smoke and watch the ducks.

Seven feet away from me, one sat isolated

and dry in the brush, a gang of flies swirling around her.

She pecked and darted her beak, swallowing

them whole. I walked over to her and

nudged her, as if the end had

feathers to fly.

Then I sat in front of her, batting the flies away,

as if it made any difference.

I ambivalently slid my shaky right hand

under this hen’s warm belly and lifted it about an inch.

Silence. What was I doing, tampering with wild frailty?

I'm so sorry. I felt ashamed.

You see, you were just too silent, unlike all those moments

you dazzled my ears with your mating calls

and food-begging quacks, wishing all the while

I could give you any morsel of my love,

for allowing me to gaze at you and your kin every day

and practice the deadly sin of envy.

She wouldn’t get up. She couldn’t walk.

And, oh, how I cursed this limiting dome of

fire and ice, of injured bones and webbed uselessness.

And the nadir of rotting inside plumage,

so close to edge. Which goes on? I wondered.

I called on Rumi to remind me how to wash

yourself of yourself, and let the world

know that nestling alone in the brush is an inch toward

salvation, toward counting, like Thoreau,

the tree rings in the cold and dying for it.

At last, I found the groundskeeper and asked him

to do something for this already-missed Muscovy.

Then, I numbly went to the pool and swam twenty laps,

grateful to be alive.