The Glass Frogs Begin

It's here! National Poetry Month  where  I feel not only justified in saturating us in poem and talk of poem, but compelled!  I am participating here on Intagliod and over at Sweetly Disturbed: there I will post in a single post/single day manner. As tradition dictates here at Intagliod, I will keep extending the poem in a single post so that I might see how it is running its rivery way down the page. Likely, by month's end, at some point, I'll hide the post, should the poem seem strong enough to try to find a home in print.

I have visited Robert Brewer's blog, Poetic Asides in order to receive my first day's prompt which deals with new arrivals and have written a little prosaic start to my:

Thirty Days of Looking at the Glass Frog

Coming into the light, a body

to grow no larger than an almond,

with nothing to hide. Clear-

bellied, the miraculous factory 

that runs them always visible, 

Their translucence against

a green leaf's a vanishing act.

Today: April, no fool's gold

to this sunshine, we're all 

about arrival.  The scientist 

who fell in love the species:

Hyalinobatrachium valerioi 

named his daughter Valerie

in their honor. 

2.

What It must be to filter light,

feel the trail it follows inside,

like intuition only warmer,

the knowing a glowing

such a little form

but standing, window

to the side, a lantern

and a teaspoon of starlight

how nightfall must fall

soft as cinder, the day

coating as slowly as dust

gathered on a piano. 

3.

Slowly, slowly the body

opens, a thorn’s puncture

here, the water glass tumbles

and a clear tooth opens

a scarlet throat in the sole

of the foot, or a possum

halfway across a highway

scripted now in elaborate entrails.

We are drawn and repelled

by what spells us out in organed-

particulars, taking the view in

a little at a time. The glass frog

belies such patience, giving us

what we want, never want

from what we love: to see

the musicbox-machinery

that runs those wistful singings.