Clade Song 6

MEMO FROM
A POSSIBLE WORLD

we saw it again
dangling its feet in a hole

then we thought we had
all our banded ducks lined up

the transponder fell
off the last of the adults

the children filed out
into the Kermadec Trench

the air was empty
and not open to echoes

all the molecules
were held back at the border

the sun tried to rise
but the sea was always too flat

Mary Cresswell is a retired natural history editor, living on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Her collection of ghazals and glosas, Fish Stories, was published in early 2015 by Canterbury University Press. She is from Los Angeles and has published in a variety of NZ, US, UK and Australian journals.