Halfway

I saw a tadpole once in a sheet of ice (a freakish joke played by my country’s weather). He hung at arrest, displayed as it were in glass, an illustration of neither one thing nor the other. His head was a frog’s, and his hinder legs had grown ready to climb and jump to his promised land; but his bladed tail in the ice-pane weighed him down. He seemed to accost my eye with his budding hand. “I am neither one thing nor the other, not here nor there. I saw great lights in the place where I would be, but rose too soon, half made for water, half air, and they have gripped and stilled and enchanted me. “Is that world real or a dream I cannot reach? Beneath me the dark familiar waters flow and my fellows huddle and nuzzle each to each while motionless here I stare where I cannot go.” The comic O of his mouth, his gold-rimmed eyes, looked in that lustrous glaze as though they’d ask my vague divinity, looming in stooped surprise, for death or rescue. But neither was my task. Waking halfway from a dream one winter night I remembered him as a poem I had to write.