Poems by Will Cordeiro

Splayfoot

by Will Cordeiro

From Canary Summer 2012

Will lives between Fall Creek and Cacadilla Creek next to many amazing waterfalls near Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region, Seneca watershed. (The poem, however, is set in the Beech Forest among the Provinceland dunes at the Cape Cod National Seashore.)

We hike the bike trail out
to Pasture Pond, a splayfoot
toad next to the roadside,
its yellow eyes about

an inch above the muck.
The pine cones sway like chandeliers.
Stock still and never blinking,
it hunched, a glistening knuckle,

its tongue behind it tense,
about to punch quick vapor trails:
blue zips of dragonflies
zigzagging iridescence.

Sick skim of scum it soaks
in started running off.
From sunning, it now leaps—
cracks seeping slime; half croaks.

As, vanished into bubbles,
past circumspect of reeds,
a rainbow-slick it banishes,
skin breathing in the muddle.