Half-Note
At the pond with koi and leaves
Sucked into the powerful pump
The bullfrog stared into my face.
Dead as a doornail; stiff
Yet still warm, his front legs
Splayed and his body swollen,
Eyes like glassy black marbles.
My hand wrapped around him.
His slimy-slick upper half
Protruded like a fat man
shooting from a cannon;
Once when I tried to climb a tree
My brother pulled my legs like this.
Water made his colors murky
Just like it fades fingerpaints.
But his belly held his pride
Serving no purpose in the end,
His search for warmth took him
To an unexpected respite.
I pulled him from the deadly hole
And saw his insides fall out
Brown as mud in the dark water
His hind legs lost to him and me
A half-a-being in my hand.
Boastless, he was some crooner,
Nature’s bass note. The pondkeeper’s
Carelessness silenced his song.
You have some powerful imagery in this poem, Pauline. “Like a fat man shooting from a cannon,” “A half-a-being in my hand,” “nature's bass note.” Very evocative. I read those bits over several times to catch and savor the flavor of them in my head. Imagery like that gives your poem a stark feel to it, the death of just a bullfrog becoming more than that, becoming momentous in some way. Beyond the imagery, the comparison to the brother pulling the speaker's legs also builds this importance to the bullfrog, this great sadness to his death at the hands of a “pondkeeper's carelessness.” This posing of the brother-memory lends the bullfrog some amount of humanity that made me *feel* for the poem.
ReplyDeleteI thought, reading, however, that you might reconsider a couple other portions of your piece. While you have these wonderful, evocative images of “a fat man shooting from a cannon,” and “his belly held his pride,” the lines “dead as a doornail” and “glassy black marbles” seem a tad flat in comparison if only because I have heard and read these phrases many other times. This doesn't make them bad, per se, but it does drag somewhat on your other images.