I Love Thinking about you Ducky
after Sketch of Hilda and Stanley, 1941

It’s animal, not just an old term of endearment.
He even draws himself as a farm bird,
pecking distance from her dog-face contentment:
a deity for his adoration.

And below, on that same paper lined for words,
he fashions himself piggish, her cow-like;
a meeting of flat-nose, fat-nose.
He licks at her pink lips,

never denigrates beasts of the field
or their ways of love. They all have souls,
so it bothers him to hear that a walk
was splendid because the walker didn’t see one,

as if blind to the eye to eye with sheep
and birds in a field, to the vitality
of trees (even naked ones) in woodland,
and deaf to all the songs that issue from them.