Sad Poets Society № 18

Confronting life, death, and transfomation with Petra Kuppers

Photo by Pongsawat Pasom on Unsplash

Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Sad Poets Society. Today, we’ll be discussing “Found on the Pond Deck” by Petra Kuppers. Let’s get into it.

Found on the Pond Deck

BY PETRA KUPPERS

The husk of a tiny dragonfly, translucent,
clings upside down on a yellow spear of grass
its roots clasp the dry wood of the deck.
Tiny white fibers everywhere: the planks, breathing,
expectorate their innards, wood weeps and uncoils
what it knew when it stood, tall in a wet Redwood forest,
before the chains of a truckbed, dark and long, bite, here,
where all trees are twisted into themselves against
the prevailing winds. On that white-spun deck,
I remember my watery nature, pour my liquid body
to wash away the pain of the shorter years,
to wash away the pain of a hollow embrace,
the feeling that we all will slide, not into the clear pool,
but into the murk of a place that should not be settled.

All things, given enough time and outside influence, eventually become something else. Mass can be neither created nor destroyed, but it can be rearranged and changed in form. Life fades and breaks down before assimilating into new life. It’s no different, really, than chewing your food before swallowing.

Even in death, the dragonfly and the deck wood join each other. Each has its own story, and yet the moral is the same: We are not who we once were. We cling to memory, to a time when we touched the sky, when we were what we were meant to be.