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There were frogs there
lots of frogs and polliwogs —
frogs’ eggs too.

Age eleven
I went there every week
to capture them—mothers, eggs and polliwogs.
I brought one home to my own mother
(who screamed as I released it —
this wildly leaping creature —
into her bedroom)
so happy I had caught a frog
like me
a captive long-legged changeling.

But what
really grabbed me
was the drain
long as a mile
that five-foot-wide conduit
with two more ducts coupled into it —
those two too small
for even a toddler to crawl —
the omnivorous culvert
tall as I was tall
that went under the railroad tracks.

And if you were lucky
or unlucky enough
the train could blaze
right over your head —
comet sparks flying only feet above you
earth shaking like an orgasm —
in the drain
in the tunnel as tall as a girl.

Like it was just the coolest thing
that would ever happen to you
if that train went overhead
and you lived to tell
about it in school.
But of course almost no one
(except my friend Eileen
who sometimes went there with me)
knew about the drain and the
two skinny pipes
like fallopian tubes
that emptied into it
so narrow that
babies could die there…

Like that kid Cathy
in nineteen-forty-something
trapped in a tunnel underground
(or was it a well?)
in god-knows-what-god-forsaken place
where she fell
and fell
like Alice
and Jill
with no jack-of-white-rabbits
to catch her
back when prayers were still answered
and we all prayed
for her three year old body and soul
gathering around the radio
and she died anyway
in the well.

I think it was in Texas —
it must have been Texas —
a place large enough to hold
all the world’s falling girls
and the vast emptiness of death
in one constricted passage…

Nearby
in dense copsewood
stood the ruin of a house —
its chimney exposed—and
jack-in-pulpit treasure
sprouting beyond the hearth.

Never had I seen such things
and always I approached
as to an altar
softly
bearing jars of polliwogs.