ManicDDaily

(Spring) Keening

The tinnitus of tree frogs
made us wince.  You laughed,
“it really is
almost deafening.”
“Crazy,” I half-
shouted back,

though the dusk itself
fell like damask, a swish of silk, its shifts
of blues, greys, greens unmasked,
as the pond cupped the evening
like a hand over an ear trying to hear
that separate resonance,
as the sky cupped the pond,
the mouth of its
own sea;

in the midst of which
we chased geese.

We’d been chasing them
all afternoon, you longer–a pair–
with shouts and even gun shot–
This last time you snuck up
with the rake, me as decoy,
but found, after they honked away,
two eggs, housed in the soon-to-be taller
grass, deposited
in what must have been
a trice.

You just can’t have geese
in a swimming pond–if you know geese, I don’t need
to tell you why–

“You warned them,” I said.
“All week,” you sighed,
then, balancing the eggs
on the rake’s claw,
moved them somewhere back
from water’s edge.

“Little foxes
need to live too,” I said,
as we each pictured
that poor mangy one
who haunted this same grass
last summer.

Later, on the porch, we waited, dreadful,
for a wail of honk, a wall of honk,
some mournful where are you? that would push against
the frogs’ insistent I’m here–

”Maybe some instinct–”
you said.  “Maybe when they’re scared off
their actual nest–”

as we watched the moon outpace
trees’ reach–so fast it moved
when measured against
branched crowns;

though once on in its own,
in the nothing but deep sky,
the rise seemed, for a while,
to still,
as if the earth stopped turning
briefly.

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A draft poem of sorts for Grapeling’s (Michael’s) “Get Listed” prompt on Real Toads.   Sorry for the length.  

For those who do not suffer from it (!), tinnitus is a ringing in the ears.  The pic is not a spring pic but it shows a mangy fox.