The Empress

By Rae

They’re all going belly-up in the creek.
Though most tadpoles don’t make it to their full form,
there are so many dying here at once, their off-shoot puddles
too small and stagnant to sustain them. 

For an hour, I shovel mud and gravel to get the water moving.
I clear a path, check the flow, carefully scoop around them. 
The next morning, I see how my efforts have drained
their areas to a muddy swamp,
and killed the rest. 

I don’t know how to do this, 
not taught to recognize
the kind of care 
being asked for. 

Still–
Quiet cups of laurel scatter along a sweating valley.
Still, land curves undress from the thicket,
pitted and bumped like a thick leg.
Still, the round rooted eye of a mother hawk holds 
open beaks in its reflection. Still, peach drips languid down a chin
Vine’s serpentine squeeze chokes unnoticed until it's too late. 
Sometimes mothering is like this.

I find other tadpoles in a different waterway
and check on them often. After heavy rains, they die too. 
“It’s hard to grow up into a frog” says Lilla. 
It’s hard growing up.

And still. The valley drips, thick with children of spring, staggering life–
five-foot Day Lillies eye me, hummingbirds buzz my inner ear,
raindrops from grasses 
overwhelming the path 
cling to my calf, 
each pore fills, all these 
bodies bodies bodies 

And spring peepers call to mate!
the chorus utters grace to my fumbling. 
their song multiplies, layers the air with 
voices of the lucky surviving few:

so many, so many.