The Wild Duck

                                                      got up with a cry

Shook off her Arctic swaddling

Pitched from the tower of the North Wind

And came spanking across water

The wild duck, fracturing egg-zero,

Left her mother the snow in her shawl of stars

Abandoned her father the black wind in his beard of stars

Got up out of the ooze before dawn

Now hangs her whispering arrival

Between earth-glitter and heaven-glitter

Calling softly to the fixed lakes

As earth gets up in the frosty dark, at the back of the Pole Star

And flies into dew

Through the precarious crack of light

Quacking Wake Wake