Singing Frogs
I have started writing poems, a thing I have not done since the morose twilight of my young adulthood. Unlike those journal-entries-in-free-verse, these current attempts contemplate a moment, an image, a feeling, a sound. They focus on the specific and the small. I feel unready to understand this pandemic at scale, even as I’m curious about its aftereffects. But I can attempt to tell all the weird, wondrous things I am noticing within my contained daily world.
Singing Frogs
Through the wet, waning evening
The frogs sing.
Calling to any other frog who can hear,
Wanna fuck? Wanna fuck? Wanna fuck? Wanna fuck?
I wonder who hops right
In this swampy Tinder.
Who meets this hope-filled, urgent call with her own
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The frogs bring to mind my students,
Forced back into their parents’ homes,
Or social distancing with roommates.
Their own season of singing thwarted,
Separated from their mates by walls and windows,
Wires and microchips and glass.
Calls frustrated through digital means.
I reach for my own partner’s hand,
Furred and rough and strong,
Familiar yet so distinct from my own,
Dry, bare, nails ragged, spotted with ink.
We met in our own froggy time and
Our songs entangled in each others’ throats.
We chose to life together,
Hopping to the same muddy spaces.
And now we stare that choice in the face,
Staying home while a virus seeks
Its own procreative path into warm bodies.
The frogs continue to call.
Surely, I think, there cannot be mates tonight for all.
And yet they go on,
Raising their voices through the dusk,
Singing for connection and sticky love and hope,
And the future.
Calling for themselves,
I am here. I am here. I am here. I am here.
