Wild Duck

I

  That was a great night we spied upon
  See-sawing home,
  Singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars
  Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze…
  Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river…
  Lights dwindling to shining slits
  In the wet asphalt…
  Purring lights… red and green and golden-whiskered…
  Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud…
  … But you did not know…
  As the trains made golden augers
  Boring in the darkness…
  How my heart kept racing out along the rails,
  As a spider runs along a thread
  And hauls him in again
  To some drawing point…
  You did not know
  How wild ducks' wings
  Itch at dawn…
  How at dawn the necks of wild ducks
  Arch to the sun
  And new-mown air
  Trickles sweet in their gullets.
II

  As water, cleared of the reflection of a bird
  That has lately flown across it,
  Yet trembles with the beating of its wings,
  So my soul… emptied of the known you… utterly…
  Is yet vibrant with the cadence of the song
  You might have been….
  'Twas a great night…
  With never a waste look over a shoulder
  Curved to the crook of the wind…
  And a great word we threw
  For memory to play knuckles with…
  A word the waters of the world have washed,
  Leaving it stark and without smell…
  A world that rattles well in emptiness: Good-by.