After the fires came the rain. The creek skipped down to the sea.
What’s drizzle? What’s downpour? asked the children of drought.
They tossed their sticks in the churn.
The frogs stirred the night with insistent song, with woo and hump
and spawn. And you and I, my love, slid down to one last pocket
of creek-bed dark to soak in that lush serenade.
We couldn’t help hear in frogs’ trembling thrum
lamentation’s lowing. Beneath creek’s gush
dry rocks abide; winter’s swift sluice was slowing
to soon trickle, stop. In that potent slough still we sensed
burbling memories’ beginnings, gelling then to hatch
polliwog now, from that far-off February swimming
to us –like the starspray over our heads those nights
whose enchanting lights, we had heard ad infinitum
as children, softly sing messages of once dazzling conflagration.
Whether poetry or prose, Ann de Forest’s work centers on the resonance of place. Her work has appeared most recently in La Piccioletta Barca, One Art, Hippocampus, and the LA Review of Books. She’s the editor of Ways of Walking, an anthology of essays (New Door Books, 2022). inspired by her experience walking the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, her adopted hometown. Since 2023, she has been a resident artist with the ecological collective, ONE LANDSCAPE, a multi-disciplinary collective of artists, curators, and scientists, engaged in India’s Shillim preserve and Napeague, in eastern Long Island.
