If it’s as real as a frog’s eye
this poet won’t touch it; such things
require nothing to be done
about them, for they are.

My business, if this madness
can so be taken, is to point
at the frog’s eye, through which i see
I should already have done less, for

there it lies, this eye described
as real, in another’s poem, wide open
arbiter, slow blinking benchmark, a taunt
might as well stop complaining. O,

you’d think I’d be used to this by now
this flash of jealous wonder, when
another poet waves an eye, a frog’s
no less, to flag Divinity’s signature;

and yet, I do not let it go, no I
belabour it with a poet’s hammer
words, words, words, each blow
right past it, and it remains.

So too, clouds, pines, the spine
of my neighbour’s roof, where spalled
brick, spilled by wind, reveals in its skitter
slowly down the shingles, time. No frogs

sing by my window, and it is mine, this frantic
eye cast lazily outward, narrowly framed
competing, for a view as neat to capture
the Unknowable Real, as a frog’s eye.

Here is an offering from this year’s 30/30, as played by Edmonton’s Stroll of Poets Society – who’ve been perpetrating poetry live and on the page since 1991. 

Poet Trudy Greinauer holds the helm for us, providing daily prompts and organised docs within whose pages we play. Ivan Sundal, whose line I stole as first line for this silly piece, is a poet philosopher whom it’s been my great fortune to call friend since before the Stroll.

Image by Zdeněk Chalupský, via Pixabay.com