Taking Pictures of Ducks


It is said that when the world was young
allusions were very popular
as when Dante plucked Odysseus
from gentleman farming on Ithaka
and burned him in hell with other liars.

I need to talk to you that way
because Erasmus walks with me this winter.
He's never done that before.
We go along an icy river bank,
taking photographs of mallard ducks.

He's wearing a wonderful Dutch fur
and loves the meters on the camera.
The ducks address December en masse,
with eyes that bead from emerald heads
tight and sleek as masquerade hoods.

Wise Erasmus, tell me this:
does the window of reason shutter the world?
Once the soul was thought to be
in the pineal gland; now Shirley MacLaine
says it is spaces between everything.

That sounds like your old mystic enemies
and the whole court of darkness.
When I get the picture from the drugstore
it is clear: ducks on a bank,
neither preening, nor hungry.    

"But look," Erasums says, a quick study,
"at the edge of your picture, a blur."

First published in Green, 1989, revised slightly, 2024
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