On a Saturday in March

"I do believe,"

I said to Mari,

"that since you are committed

to quilting every piece of cloth in the house,

I will drive over to Sweetwater Swamp

with my camera."

A raft of ducks, ducking.

Who knows? I am no birder! A bird. And a tree.
In spring.

On a moonlit night,
this would be a lair;
a fearsome critter's seclusion.

A cattail as old as I: same hair.

A natural satellite disk
tuned to the Nature Channel.

Heron, thinking of frogs and crayfish,
between sessions on the nest in the eucalyptus tree.

"If you send the picture to the newspaper,"
the couple from Iowa told me,
"we can give you their names.
They are our grandchildren."

"Oh," I replied,
"I am not from a newspaper.
I was just thinking of the St. Croix River,
at Stillwater, Minnesota,
where the ice is about to break up."

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