The tadpole pond on the heights above the creek has been bulldozed away. Life was always tenuous at the rim of the fields dedicated to a vague but spacious form of industry, scoured and stripped yearly by heavy machinery. The pond's existence may have been an accident of a stuck tire or an idle bite of a power shovel. I say beside the bulldozed hollow of dry air, "It doesn't matter." To me, anyhow, not having interviewed the toad or volvox. A poet before an ecologist, I conjure a pond in air, with romantics testifying to the superiority of the disembodied. I carry it where I go. Midwinter I make it sing with the rutting of toads.
