A Blanket Apology

by Stewart Cole

Last night I dreamt a Ring-necked duck as big as a Buick.
It had a kind of placid menace, as though its size,
So anomalous, was the result of choices I or someone
Like me had made – as though, in its austere silence,
With its peaked skull in profile and its eye like a gaseous,
Fiery planet, it was emanating a voiceless message:
You should be afraid of what you’ve done. Either the sky
Was the surface of a lake on the bottom of which I was standing,
Miraculously unwet and strong of lung, or the duck was hovering
In mid-air, like a UFO about to project its tractor beam. 

I awoke, in fact, with an aching wish in my chest to have been taken, 
To have been brought aboard that feathered deck, abducted 
And probed and found, if not innocent, then at least of value,
At least unwarranting a snort of derision from the little-noted
Nostrils of ducks. I kept thinking, in the elastic seconds
This minor-key anguish, now laughable, lasted, of how I’d never
Seen its webbed feet or thought to wonder at their absence,
So rubber-ducky-minded must I be from childhood. Kept thinking, 
Too, of the white ring encircling its bill as being like a vertical halo, 

Evidence of a tussle with a lucky angel it dispatched to the after-afterlife,
A residue to invest with vicarious significance, a strip of the celestial
Betokening the possibility of a blanket forgiveness, a cipher that,
Once unkeyed, tells us that though our days may begin in guilt,
There is something gargantuan out there that makes our petty fuckery
Like the algae a duck eats – a real-sized duck, in a ditch
Fed by a culvert that spills into a river, which in turn empties itself
Into a chain of ever-larger lakes, every molecule of whose water bears marks
Of something someone somewhere might eventually feel sorry for.

Stewart Cole is the author of two poetry collections, Questions in Bed (2012) and Soft Power (2019), both with Goose Lane Editions, the oldest independent publisher in his home country of Canada. A Wisconsinite since 2013, he teaches English and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh. He is an avid birder, hiker, forager, and amateur naturalist. His third poetry manuscript in progress is entitled Speck.