A bullfrog!
Once this rallying cry
compelled your shirtless, bare foot sprint
across five lawns,
vaulting the garden fence, to land
amongst the clamour, your friends
waiting for your ten year old tom-girl hands
to catch and cup
the rough- skinned, fluttery white belly,
as warm piss
seeped through your unflinching fingers.
It was your penchant for naked feet,
that inspires us to speak—
under the stone dome of this chapel.
Shoes discarded, flung into the hedge,
your soft pads toughened.
You grew your treasured calluses, flaunted them.
Hooves, they were, to bear the heat
of Manhattan streets in summer
and the sting of fresh snow.
Through swollen creeks you waded,
up the slopes of the Andes and along the Amazon,
even slipped off your sandals to tread
the Great Wall of China.
Moved your kids to Hawaii
just so you could live unshod year round.
Now we resurrect your Greenwich Village
twenties, how you frequented clubs in designer gowns.
Rifling through your fifty-two years,
someone mentions the ailing kittens and babies
you fostered, and of course the six adoptions
as a single Mom.
Overhead, a chevron of geese honk their way south.
And we stop our ears to the blare
of your insistence for harsh truths,
how anger would rise up through your soles,
your Taurean stomp of outrage.
No one brings up the bruises from your tongue—
still tender after decades.
Or how to reconcile our image of you
— aged six, laughing on the kitchen floor,
chocolate milk squirting from your nose.
We puzzle over the particulars, your life rich
with contradiction, wonder
if you will somehow intervene to deny all of it.
Are you astonished at the crowd,
come to farewell you, Sally?
Those same friends — still
clamouring for you —to capture and hold onto
life’s wild handful of quiver and piss.