"The duck stood on the mountiantop,
  Then, spreading wings, leapt down."

From a platform's splintered rail, looking down
to reeds bowing as Malliard ducks sail through,

my arms are wings, my head blue-green,
feathery, and I don't understand what the
other ducks are quacking. about me?

Dunking head underwater, I find a
question: What have you become?

The oracle at Delphi was always right, but never
as first interpreted. The meaning of her utterance
lay in the structure of the riddle, and in the no
man’s land between riddle and solution.

As I walk home for breakfast, my wings
collapse, my feathers become a jacket,
I'm drenched in the illusion of another
kind of being.

 

 

 

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