Ducks Sat
Where ducks sat we sat next
And wanted to be Dutch.
If we would walk upright and not
Glance right or left the intersections
Would not come at us
Sideways, is what we thought.
But after a time it is hard
To keep feeling you are making this the best time
To look back on.
We talked. Some times I would walk
By a beetle thrashing
On the rocking of its domed-back and flip
It rightside. To say I’m here, and you be there.
Now the cicadas. Their long curving
Sound, and I turn
The thick line of their music into
Us. Even the ducks.
Then look back at the trip, how
Better than to be on it it is to be
Well bathed, and able to read the coins
And translate their value.
Copyright © 2016 by Michele Glazer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 4, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Walking in Amsterdam, I experienced the Dutch as singularly focused, and solid; people occupying space unequivocally, gracefully, even as they were moving through it. One aspect of traveling for me is feeling awash in ambivalences. I want glints of how it feels to be inside the foreign culture looking out, while at the same time I know it is ridiculous to think I will be privy, and further, I will not know even the extent to which I do not know. It’s not as hard as it sounds, all this uncertainty. But, there I was, senses heightened, trying to be attentive. And then there were ducks, so the ducks went in the poem. The poem’s catalyst is also the first sentence: a sturdy rhythm and a twist that got at something of that Dutchness. If there had been no ducks, perhaps there would have been no poem.”
—Michele Glazer
Michele Glazer
Michele Glazer is the author of On Tact, & the Made Up World (University of Iowa Press, 2010).