Frog Pond

Stuck pat with strawberry magnets to her sub-zero are all the stages: gill slits, lungs, sex—stopped at the third month, when the fetus is sucked out into a clear plastic bag. Reaching in for a quick soda, you can almost feel that flexible wind on your face. The fetus (named Jennifer, it says) develops in color-photo sequence till the second trimester, when (more bold-face) the kid's a murder victim, in cold blood, of Mom. You beckon to nothing: milk cartons, cans, stand in the chill blast of the suction door and grab your Sprite. Day and night she stands outside the clinics with the other Lifers. My advice: don't take her on. I once learned phylogeny provides intelligent options—but survival does not always select for insight. Down the line: there's a smug printed sign talking up adoption: Right. So, knocked up, I'd owe my body to an forgiving god, who'd swallow my offspring t00? Here's a fat man rattling a blood red genie in a pickle jar. No wedding ring. See that woman, head bent—they're hurrying her through the police cordon, past the screaming faces? I've walked where she's walking now— and where she lies now, I once lay, behind that secured door, near that white waiting table. My mind divided, momentarily, as if the world were just birth or no birth, what I could or could not do and still seem human to myself. Who first fixed in my head that slashed membrane between life and death? (I'd go toe-to-toe against her, but she stops me cold with her small, past due figure of remorse.)God, what next? she asks, leaning against her icebox, her T-shirt shouting how she pities the unborn. So do I. But not as much as I pity her, quickening with hate. And love: for those would-be lives inbred to a set of family gestures. One day on our way to the frog pond we take my daughter's hands, saying nothing—one on each side. She asks me why I don't see what she believes. I want to say I do, I see through all the cross- wielding apologists to why she, alone in her kitchen, grieves. It's sad. The big frogs croak like TV preachers pad to pad. But look: at the pond rim she points out tadpoles—hundredsm ink-black, legless. See? we both say. My daughter kneels, tries to cup them in her fist, but they're too fast. Born again and again into the limits of our perception, they swim intuitively, the way we think. She calls that revelation. We're surrounded by the bull chorus, a booming, backlit percussion.Call it revelation