Tomato Pond

Though night’s over, a yellow street light

shines through wax myrtle. Sky is gray cotton.

Six ibis fly over, pond water alive.

Rumble of a passing car, heater vents.

More ibis, dozens, one circles back

it must have forgotten something —

where it was going perhaps. The slack

of low tide, the lunar flow stills.

This pond grew tomatoes

before Hurricane Hugo —

the soil went to fill Folly Island’s

greater loss. A culvert pulls in fish

with every coming tide, harvest

for water birds instead of hired hands.

Walden [excerpt]

Henry David Thoreau:

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which they will have less need to practice in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.