Michael P. McManus

Tonight behind the darkened house,
the swamp begins to build its house of sounds,
which is where a bullfrog's fluent brogue
hides its Buddha from the Spanish Moss.
And then, in part because it's deeper dark,
ten-million cicada begin to march
en masse up rickety stairs to this screened-in porch,
filling, too, with mosquitoes through holes neglected
like the plank boards creaking beneath restless soles,
which shift uneasily six feet below these animal eyes.
Such sight is why I hunger for the Wood duck
adrift like a teapot in the cattails,
where its seahorse-styled neck disappears
beneath the water, only to betray  
that permanence when it reappears.  
Come to wade along the shore,
many-tined, myth-like, but not a beast,
the whitetail stoops to drink the moon's reflection
that shimmers in the shallows,
each step a precious chant,
whose mantra is luminous in my mind,
where hidden in a tree the owl is the tree,  
but not its shape, as it listens
to invisible poems written by the wind,
whose verses, perhaps, will sing to something difficult;
just now the bough broken in the tempest,  
or this muddied photograph with your eternal smile
that I no longer care to clean.