The Ducks

Every so often one of us will write the other, I miss the ducks.

Then time opens and it’s as if we are back there again

in the grubby plastic chairs you’d salvaged. The afternoon light

glimmered to halo us. We might have been angels.

The mallards would huddle, wander about,

chatter, then disappear to the edge

of the pond just out of sight.

Every so often things return and go and return:

the ducks back from their winter flight somehow

older and less downy, quieter. Us in those chairs,

with those ducks—and the chickens, too, and the rabbits,

before the coyotes got them.