Turtle, Swan

Mark Doty

Because the road to our house

is a back road, meadowlands punctuated

by gravel quarry and lumberyard,

there are unexpected travelers

some nights on our way home from work.

Once, on the lawn of the Tool

and Die Company, a swan;

the word doesn’t convey the shock

of the thing, white architecture

rippling like a pond’s rain-pocked skin,

beak lifting to hiss at my approach.

Magisterial, set down in elegant authority,

he let us know exactly how close we might come.

After a week of long rains

that filled the marsh until it poured

across the road to make in low woods

a new heaven for toads,

a snapping turtle lumbered down the center

of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet.

His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out

of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.

We’d have lifted him from the road

but thought he might bend his long neck back

to snap. I tried herding him; he rushed,

though we didn’t think those blocky legs

could hurry — then ambled back

to the center of the road, a target

for kids who’d delight in the crush

of something slow with the look

of primeval invulnerability. He turned

the blunt spear point of his jaws,

puffing his undermouth like a bullfrog,

and snapped at your shoe,

vising a beakful of — thank God —

leather. You had to shake him loose. We left him

to his own devices, talked on the way home

of what must lead him to new marsh

or old home ground. The next day you saw,

one town over, remains of shell

in front of the little liquor store. I argued

it was too far from where we’d seen him,

too small to be his . . . though who could tell

what the day’s heat might have taken

from his body. For days he became a stain,

a blotch that could have been merely

oil. I did not want to believe that

was what we saw alive in the firm center

of his authority and right

to walk the center of the road,

head up like a missionary moving certainly

into the country of his hopes.

In the movies in this small town

I stopped for popcorn while you went ahead

to claim seats. When I entered the cool dark

I saw straight couples everywhere,

no single silhouette who might be you.

I walked those two aisles too small

to lose anyone and thought of a book

I read in seventh grade, “Stranger Than Science,”

in which a man simply walked away,

at a picnic, and was,

in the act of striding forward

to examine a flower, gone.

By the time the previews ended

I was nearly in tears — then realized

the head of one-half the couple in the first row

was only your leather jacket propped in the seat

that would be mine. I don’t think I remember

anything of the first half of the movie.

I don’t know what happened to the swan. I read

every week of some man’s lover showing

the first symptoms, the night sweat

or casual flu, and then the wasting begins

and the disappearance a day at a time.

I don’t know what happened to the swan;

I don’t know if the stain on the street

was our turtle or some other. I don’t know

where these things we meet and know briefly,

as well as we can or they will let us,

go. I only know that I do not want you

— you with your white and muscular wings

that rise and ripple beneath or above me,

your magnificent neck, eyes the deep mottled autumnal colors

of polished tortoise — I do not want you ever to die.