Now the lake advances in creeping hands along the shore
and the lifeguard chair is empty, there’s the threat of showers,
the tree boughs move with the underwater look
of deep-sea creatures in slow motion
and the frog beneath our hot tub
looks like a walnut shell,
a leopard-spotted slug with its eyes
fixed on mine, conforming to the edge
as I lower the lid.

On the seam between summer and fall,
my dog tugging at something on the lakeshore
like a stump or a log, it sounds wooden like that,
a dead rabbit, the legs in the air
and eyes open still and stiff, and odd
I thought about the frog, and closing the lid:
that’s the first thing we do with the dead
is lower the lids,
we can’t stand the look of them that way,
a parody of themselves frozen in time,
we do what we can to fix them,
we make believe they’re just resting now.

Categories: poetry, writing

Tags: Autumn, death, fall, frogs, poem, slugs, William Pearse writer