My husband’s hatching duck eggs.
While I’m away, here,
writing poems, he’s got
8 eggs in an incubator,
in his office.
4 times a day, for 35 days
he must turn his eggs
180 degrees. He must mist
them with water, too,
because, being ducks,
they like water.
4 times a day, he’ll come running
back to the house, bounding
up the stairs, crying,
“Time to turn the ducks!”
I can imagine this.
“I have no friends,”
he told me on the phone,
“so I need to hatch some.”
“We miss you,” he says,
every time he hangs up.
He counts the days
til the emergence of his flock
of small new friends.
While I’m here, writing poems,
one by one, he holds them
up to a lamp to see if they are living.
They’re still mostly yolk,
he reported last night, but now
in 28 eight short days they’ll sport
damp wings and feathers, eyes and feet,
and small blunt bills to tap tap tap
their way out from the inside,
opening the wall
of the world,
a hole to the light,
where they’ll first catch
sight of his face,
(…he is leaning over them
watching, heart in his throat…)
and come bursting forth,
and fall hopelessly in love.
One Comment
Hello Ruth,
I’m devouring these new bits of writing. I met you at Words on the Water several years ago when we lived on Quadra. I’m ready to read your novels now. Maru (Moreka’s mom) from Quadra gave them to me and my husband Bob read them, but I was in a different space then… I live in Arizona now and am writing a book about healing. Well I want to write a book about healing. I figure the bones of it will come to me as I teach my new students about what I know. About energy and healing and about how our issues are mapped on the body and in our energy fields….
I am trying to locate your beautiful writing about your mother’s dying and death. I remember reading it and being moved. I sent the article to my mother in England, a grief therapist. Can you point me in the right direction for this article? There was an interview with you and you were going to do a talk in San Francisco, I think… I’d dearly love to get away from Tucson in the summer and come to do your writing workshop on Cortes…. But first I’ll have to make some money with my new school. I’m starting small. Five students. And my first Tucson workshop this coming Sunday. Perhaps it is good timing, what with this town being so upset recently… Wish me luck! All the best, Ruth. Keep writing. Catriona