the runs

When I was 24 I moved to Portland and lived with Jessie (& it's her birthday on tuesday) and Adán and Jon and that weird blacksmither who was into fractals and TOOL & made business cards out of razor blades. Some of us drove to Battleground, WA where we met four ducks & we packed them in wire duck cages on newspaper. It cost us $40 for the four of them. They shat all over the newspaper on the way home. We'd built them a pond with a heavy expensive tarp beneath that we covered with rocks and took days to fill with water. They each laid an egg every day. The young ones would lay in weird places, underfoot sometimes or hard to find in the blackberries, and the older one would push them into piles with her beak & try to hide them from us. I started waking up everyday to the quacking of Candace who was the bossy one, big & mottled with shiny violet feathers & she'd quack & nip at all the others and take all of the food. She was the one who liked to push & hide all of the eggs so we couldn't take them, but we were hungry. I found her one day sitting on a nest she'd made beneath some scrubby bush with 18 eggs neatly snugging beneath her splayed duckbody. I left her 8 of them so she wouldn't feel like it was all for naught. We ate duck eggs every day. They had such a strong foul beautiful deeprich flavor. They had the biggest yolks, goldorange yolks that greased all down your throat & oiled up your palate. I nearly choked every time. I used to like running yolks, but those were those of the meager chickens so I never know what a real yolk could be. They kind of ruined me because I like really strong intense food but the duck yolk is far stronger & tougher & more rich & foul than I'll ever be.

16: pacific duck, ruddy loon

Oh at the grass I am, and there the ducks, ruddy & floating without legs without feet or arms, on water consistent like yogurt. The marsh lined with mallow curtaining the down afloat. The water, the element of, heavier than air. My fingers creeping lichens over your face, over your face, presenting you a spring shell-flower; within it hidden ring-lichens, concentric fleshy loops for your pretty hand. The celtic cross shaded over us before the sun, its snakeweed shadow-maker blowing. It is a breeze. It is a breeze which makes a howl throat out from the dog-lichens, their membranous moans keeping the screech-owl up too late. I want to know, at night, the loon and its stories of sweeping the Pacific. Make me sleep for the better.