I’d been awakened before by hammers cracking across the pond,
but who’d be building at dawn? On a Sunday?
And I remembered the ducks, a loggerhead
must have eaten another duck. So I rolled into my jeans
and walked out onto the porch. Then the crack again,
and I saw through the fog dusting the banks and the pond
a man on the far bank, my neighbor
in the branches of a tree, his pistol
pecking at the water, and just the right angle
to catch my house with a ricochet.
Whatever new threat I shouted
must have worked. That afternoon he took to traps,
baiting his hooks with livers and fish heads,
floating them under milk jugs. All evening
I watched from my porch as he labored in his boat, knotting
his lines, tying his bait, easing out the jugs
like a rope of pearls,
and learned how much he cared for the ducks-
and how he must have hated what killed them, the snappers
with their ugly armored hearts, who wallow
like turnips in the muck of the bottom, clinging
to their stony solitude,
who refuse to sun, hiding like lost
fears, rising when they’re least expected
into a panic of wings. This is what I thought about
as I rowed in the dark from one jug to the next, stripping
the bait from his hooks.
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