Frog Pond

By Carol Muske-Dukes
Stuck pat with strawberry magnets
to her sub-zero are all the stages:
gill slits, lungs, sex—stopped
at the third month, when the fetus

is sucked out into a clear plastic bag.
Reaching in for a quick soda, you can almost
feel that flexible wind on your face.
The fetus (named Jennifer, it says)

develops in color-photo sequence till the second
trimester, when (more bold-face) the kid's
a murder victim, in cold blood, of Mom. You beckon
to nothing: milk cartons, cans, stand in the chill blast

of the suction door and grab your Sprite.
Day and night she stands outside the clinics
with the other Lifers. My advice: don't
take her on. I once learned phylogeny

provides intelligent options—but survival
does not always select for insight.
Down the line: there's a smug printed
sign talking up adoption: Right.

So, knocked up, I'd owe my body to
an forgiving god, who'd swallow my offspring
t00? Here's a fat man rattling a blood red
genie in a pickle jar. No wedding ring.

See that woman, head bent—they're hurrying her
through the police cordon, past the screaming faces?
I've walked where she's walking now—
and where she lies now, I once lay,

behind that secured door, near that white
waiting table. My mind divided, momentarily,
as if the world were just birth or no birth,
what I could or could not do and still seem

human to myself. Who first fixed in
my head that slashed membrane between life
and death? (I'd go toe-to-toe against her,
but she stops me cold with her small, past due

figure of remorse.) God, what next?  she asks,
leaning against her icebox, her T-shirt
shouting how she pities the unborn. So do I.
But not as much as I pity her, quickening

with hate. And love: for those would-be
lives inbred to a set of family
gestures. One day on our way to the frog
pond we take my daughter's hands, saying

nothing—one on each side. She
asks me why I don't see what she believes.
I want to say I do, I see through all the cross-
wielding apologists to why she, alone in her kitchen, grieves.

It's sad. The big frogs croak like TV preachers
pad to pad. But look: at the pond rim
she points out tadpoles—hundredsm ink-black, legless.
See? we both say. My daughter kneels, tries to cup them

in her fist, but they're too fast. Born again and
again into the limits of our perception, they swim
intuitively, the way we think. She calls that
revelation. We're surrounded by the bull

chorus, a booming, backlit percussion. Call
it revelation she says aloud, and I won't, though
I'd call it the soul of a woman. Not the one she
discovers at conception. No, this one, this

split-cell insight, sister, sister,
this raw fixed light in her face set to mine.

 

Copyright Credit: Carol  Muske-Dukes, "Frog Pond" from Red Trousseau.  Copyright © 1993 by Carol  Muske-Dukes.  Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Source: An Octave Above Thunder (Penguin Books, 1997)