Ceramic Duck
Pete Mladinic
Everybody
says forgiveness.
Resentment
came to mind,
then
clumsiness. A reward for spilling,
for
knocking over things. It’s
good,
clumsy. The ceramic duck
whose
orange bill you chipped
when
you knocked it off the sill,
if it
Thanked you would say I lived whole
since
the 1953 day I came from the kiln
down
the block, into your mother’s hands,
a
gift, the black scroll on my yellow breast
Billy,
you, her first born. I’m dusty,
A
white chip in my bill as much part of me
as
green wings forever spread,
and
orange webs of my feet.
What’s
done..forget fixing me.
Then
there’s resentment. Joe
felt
nothing you gather, the day
you
stumbled on the swan, long neck
splintered,
as if broke by knocks of a stone.
Talk
about ugly, cruelty’s aftermath
in a
green plot of lawn, back
from
a brown river, the splinters,
the
swan deader than dead, the nothing
you
gather in your arms, Joe
dead
in a car wreck before his 21st year
leans
as you lean over the dead thing.
