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A Beaver’s Life

By Aaron Suranofsky

A pond-wet nose sifts air, spinning the brown strip of fur
like a dancer's wrist draws a ribbon 

into delicate loops, crisscrossing dogwood bristles 
a few feet from where I petrify myself into a tree.

Dull black eyes curl my reflection:
another tall brown blur

for the rodent who sacrificed clear sight
for fancy third eyelid goggles.

It sniffs out the perfect snack-strip of branch, pinched level 
with rubber fingers, it slides the wood through its ivory lathe,

roughing off chips of bark, sharpening raw tan
into tasty puffs of dust. For five minutes

its jaw drums the pond, quaking the sound
of flinting stone into even spaced O’s of force.

Like the beaver’s a star, the tiny splash-flicks of frogs 
have chosen to revolve,

their peeps meeting the rhythm
of water wobbling over their green noses.

I lean to the music, a twig snaps alarm– its eyes catch me,
like a sequin glimmer on a cloudy day,

and it sledges its tail paddle to the water,
thwacking a crater, and in the spray of cover

it twirls, swallowed lithe without a tremble
in the pond clean of any sign it was there.
Home-Building Beaver by Pat Frantz Cercone

Filed Under: Nature and the Environment Feature

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