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Variant 4
When I Say Duck, I Mean Duck
Brenda Schmidt
“Now we are persons breaking open. The real is not enough to pleasure us.”
—Lisa Robertson
The Weather
(Lame Duck)
It's not the lame duck's odd waddle,
the slow motion thrown off-balance,
or the quick quack, the billed lament
that eventually wakes me, but silence. Silence,
noisy friend, take the pain of this varicose light
with you when you go. I want to hear more
ducks swim, more webbed feet peddling underwater.
I want to taste the muddied bubbles on the surface,
to pop them with my tongue, to feel what is
feather retentive, water resistant, ripple encircled.
I want to be alone with the real, with the swimming.
(Sitting Duck)
Sleep puddles in the sitting duck dream
right behind the butcher, behind what has been cleaved;
every fevered night bone chips rip through
muscle, vessel, fat and leave
a bloody passage through the layers, through
the wads a body holds together as the mind
worries the gray matter apart.
Everything real is wet and dripping.
(Dead Duck)
Real tears on the pillow soak the dead duck feathers
back to life.
A duck rips the seams and emerges to peer
one-eyed in my mouth. This waterfowl truly is
foul without water. I open wide, swallow and absorb
the waddle, every shift of weight, the mud
it tracks all the way through, and I follow it,
turning inside-out,
down a ruined moonlit path to a slough
where it will dabble, ass up, for life.
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