Mallardy

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Mallardy
© 2015 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

For the mallards who migrate and for those who stay behind, life is not easy. Much of the habitat on which they depend has been taken from them. Every year, I do what I can to make up for it.

Mallards are gathering.  Hungry, complaining, up before sunrise and nothing in the belly. They stir the surface and wait. One calls. A loud descending voice like an old man railing against condition and age. The others mumble under their breath. Annoyed, querulous. Impatient for the food that has not arrived. Anxious for the giver to come yet mistrustful. A cry goes up and they fly a distance when they see him. Even though they know him.

They are wise not to trust.

Soon they will separate: Drakes to the one side, former fathers former sons molting together into winter iridescence (depending on the angle of view, night sky blue or brilliant green fire). Hens to the other side, former mothers former daughters drab in the brown that hides them but for that flash of purple deep as a welder’s arc and a final daub of white (almost hidden except when they take flight). Soon they will leave, these two drawn lots, on different days weeks apart but not toward a different route or result. They will be shot with equanimity all along the way, in great number, on their endless perilous journey seeking south.

But while they are here, I provide: I stand in place of the estuary that has been rerouted, water grass that was drowned, wild rice turned under, beaches walled off deep of the high tide mark and the sound of empty shells rolling in the back wash. I am the Source now, come stumbling and blurry as the cold ground fog laid down on the earth. I come every day. As if their lives depend on it.  As if my life depends on it.

And it does.  And it does.

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