sun

Spoke with a duck today. We were sharing the pool. He was eider and grape, with a curly feather on his hind end. I was Boston winter white, in a cheap blue bathing suit that bunches around the bum. He was surprised that I was in the water as most of the other spa denizens lay shivering in the mid-Winter desert sunshine, but the water was heated and I'd sat in the sun's heat, reading Newsweek which is enough to raise a penguin's temperature, all that pandering and balderdash. "Are you Poopy?" I asked him. He deigned to answer, which would be just like Poopy, but he did shake his wing at me before settling on the rough, red paving stones next to the pool steps. Perhaps a "friend of Poopy".

He watched me inch my way into the deeper water, waist, breasts, neck, and, finally, the plunge and the glory of weightlessness, that faint memory of returning to the womb. I swam toward the pounding waterfall, drizzly drops pelting my face. My avian friend quacked, just once. A duck of few words. 

This morning I sat on the balcony of our room, and a tiny, fat bird flew from the nearest palm tree to the balcony's railing, holding a juicy berry in it's beak. "Are you Poopy?" I asked him, and he gulped his berry down, just like Poopy would attack a mound of Fancy Feast Seafood delight.  He regarded me with his tiny beady eye, cocking his head this way and that.

Perhaps Poopy is now everywhere, in every creature, on every breeze  (though hopefully not with post-Fancy Feast Seafood delight breath).  Poopy as a state of mind.

There is wonder in the rawness of loss. This is hope in despair. 

Just remind me of this later, when everything is more real, and the world isn't filled with talking ducks and sunshine.