Amphibious
by Dana Holley Maloney
Driving home in darkness, we pass patches on Webster Road
where spring peepers are shrieking like car alarms. We
can map the vernal ponds by the pockets of whistling we pass.
And once down our driveway, standing in darkness, the stereo
sound of this sort of symphony, high-pitched chirping circling
around itself, the tell-tale chatter of the wood frogs as overlay.
The pond beside us the product of what the land wants when
the rain arrives, when what was woods becomes puddled, overflow
heading for the brook with its minor cascades. For some time we are
an island encircled by flow and falls, water running, even babbling.
Then the rain slows, stills, and sinks, the soil audibly drinks. Below us,
water continues toward river and aquifer. No less than miracle,
this metamorphosis–water to land in one day, across a lifetime.
Not long from now, trees will sing.
Dana Holley Maloney is a native New Jerseyan who lives and writes in midcoast Maine. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Tar River Poetry, The Lake, Pine Hills Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Montclair State University. More at danamaloney.com.