that spring

By Shannon Nakai

                 For Joel

 

that spring when I was bargaining you into existence we noticed the families, so many of them on

the sludge-streaked ponds, picnicking on riverbanks, squabbling on sidewalks. we began counting

them, first the babies, and when they grew too many, the families. it felt like winning whenever we

spotted them, prehistoric fringe and feathered parasol. only when the young strayed were we able to

discern one family from another, the way they shrieked and spitted if another got too close. one

afternoon I sat in the swelter of a parked car, windows unrolled, watching them as minute devoured

hour. so effortlessly they moved, in enviable number, so simply they dropped barrel-bottomed into

the water one by one, a shagged trailing line. my hand lifted towards them, so natural to touch

something that soft, like overbrushed baby blankets or the sepulchral cheek of last year’s

baby left in the hospital mortuary, forgive me, but how can anything this soft be entrusted to us to

touch? the soft promise of someday against each fingertip, the pond skin pulsating in rippled

rhythmic distention like the wild whirring of your twelve-week-old heartbeat, a conch shell we tested

for the sound of the ocean, the fixed gaze on the geese in sunset-inked water.

 

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