1
His hairlip makes for an amazing ribbit,
Deep-throated and sour until even
The best of male basses get jealous,
Sort of, the cry from the pond
Nightly to 25,000 embryos in waiting,
A bleating heated female
Rana catesbeiana (we call her RC for short
In our circles), stoked at the thought of his ducts,
His throat, billowing his cry across the fauna,
And she knows, like she knows the willowing dry
Of baked mud, that that’s her man calling her in;
She’ll listen a bit, to make him wait.
2
The fairytale has it mostly wrong, and where’s the surprise
In that, like the litoria dentata would
ever deign to be kissed by simply any princess.
His high bleating shriek is reserved,
given to only the finest kingdom-bearing damsels.
Now. But wasn’t always so. There
was the night, high in the trees, moon behind a planet
Or some stars, or it was just too small
Because she looked like a damsel, and she smelled like a damsel,
And the promises were sweet,
and two out of the three toes on every foot primped in anticipation, alas,
deceived, the tympanum meeting the pierce of yet another tympanum,
yellowed from excitation, and both the boys were embarrassed,
If not curious, but later,
For that was a night for kingdom hunting, princesses in need of fulfilling expectation.
3
He doesn’t smell as good up close as you might imagine,
Our pond’s grandfatherly froglord.
In fact, get a good whiff, and he’ll let you have
generations of washed dreams,
of moved families, of gone-and-run husbands, of haven’t-been-seen-
again wives, all the detriment
of their lives, the debris, the warp, the bends,
washed through the creekbed to the pond
Where Grandpa wallows in the silliness, in the false importance,
In the minor deshacklings
of the comings and goings, but always mainly goings
of those that ignore him, his song
a warning to all new arrivals: danger, beware, I’ve seen it happen before,
I’ll see it happen again,
and you look like such a nice young couple, danger, beware.
Ignored again, passed over,
His song a gigging to the restless dreams of the couple’s ego, wondering, asking Where did their love go.
4
“Here comes the wind, again, the splash of the two-legged can,
Dipping into my home, taking
the children, taking so many. Well, c’est la vie, oui?
I’m common, and more will come,
more cans, more squeaks of delight at wriggling – at wriggling,
Imagine that! In my youth
I wriggled, wriggled like a mad frog impressing all the girls with
My tail, gone now, too.
Like the girls. All gone. You get to be my age,
With my croak, with my unmannerly habits,
they turn away more than to, too much time away they say, and
I get the occasional mercy
lay, a progenitation of the species,
I’m common, but the children must be protected,
well, sort of, you can’t combat the can, and I’m happy to have learned
Just what my will and my do
Have in common with the can.
I’m common, and the girls don’t come around, no more.”
5
Litoria Aurea went a-ridin’ and he did ride, unh-huh.
He rode the tree limb to the grating through
the ditch at the culvert to the spillway at the mouth
Of the creek that went to the sea.
Litoria Aurea didn’t plan on staying long, but had to
Get away for just a bit, same old mud
every day, same old tree limb every night,
Same complaining wife with 18,000 eggs to tend
(And she seems so accusatory, as though he were a one-
Man army and the eggs were magic); the sea
tends to no green and golden bell frog for long,
As the sea is preoccupied with the operations
that go into being a sea – seas are told
They might make ocean if they just keep striving;
he went a-ridin’ but his was a story he found no one
Interested in listening to, all with stories
of their own to tell, all with unexplained magic,
All with the same old mud, the same old tree;
Litoria Aurea is being itched by this substance called sand,
Unfamiliar to him, but countable
For all that, and he will count the grains, to bide the time,
To matter – one, two, three…
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All rights reserved.
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