~
The Tadpoles (Imperial Beach, 1954)
Standing at the muddy edge
of a drenched field, I bent over
a puddle like an apprentice
to a sorcerer. I had woken
in the night to the staccato slurring
of rain furrowing my ears.
What else had a heartbeat
like the many-chambered bell
I heard in the womb — oval
of my slow unfolding.
Could they have grown this quickly
from nothingness? They wiggled
like the fingertips of God’s
amputated hand, severed
yet still squeezing the sun
and earth into night
and day, the skin-breathers
of time, “the glide before
the complete halt.” I pluck
from the puddle a dark
brown pebble past which a tadpole
has just twitched in an orbit
of an impetuous flicker and roll
it between the palms of my tiny
hands as it I could round off its edges
and then blow on it like an ember
emboldened to permeate itself,
another glowing mutability.
The next morning, the puddle
was a shadow stained
with the undulant shimmer
of vanishing clouds.
~
Bill Mohr is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. His critical essays and literary commentary have appeared in journals such as the William Carlos Williams Review, Journal of Beat Studies, Idées d’Amérique, Chicago Review, and the LA Review of Books. His most recent collection of poems, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana, is a bilingual edition published by What Books in Los Angeles in 2018. His poems have also been translated into Croatian, Italian, and Japanese. He blogs at billmohrpoet.com; his website is koankinship.com.