Muscovy Ducks

Muscovy ducks
Can be big and imposing,
But truly they're gentle birds. 

Their big carbuncular
Faces belie
Their golden eyes that sweetly gaze.

Splintering off in several groups,
Two or three buddies swim,
Doing their thing, then recongregate.

Huffing and hissing,
Waggling their tails,
They're actually happy to see friends.

Sometimes they tussle
In tiny disputes for dominance,
But I've never seen it get bloody.

At night they gather together, sleeping
In bushes, trees, or each other's
Warmth—all entirely precious.

Pond Scene

Perching upon a branch
The great gray heron waits.
Water scurrying by
With schools of tiny fish
Who don't know it's above.

Flashes flutter beneath;
Silver silhouettes swim
Alongside little domes
That breach the surface line,
Raising curious heads
With colorful streaked sides—
Pond sliders peeking out.

Across the pond I see
A white party of birds.
In this wading group, one,
Skinny and statuesque,
Stands above all the rest.
A great white egret waits
As tiny ibises
Pick and poke through the grass;
And two diminutive
Snowy egrets play,
The one chasing his mate
Until she takes to flight,
Landing a couple feet
Away. He flies in suit,
Tracing upon the blue 
His little yellow pair
Of banana peel feet.

Overhead rose a cry
Like raspy guiro scrapes;
A long shadow appeared:
A great grey heron flies,
Attracting the branch-sat
One, engaging their wings
Toward the high treetops.
They circle in a pair
Once and a second time,
Then a third circuit make
Before they disappear
Within the woody heights.

There’s a hole that we know

There's a hole that we know and we want filled,
A dream that settles in the void like mist.
Somehow a cloudy rheum that distorts kissed
The comfort of a conquest we could build,
Lifetime endeavors of a heart unstilled
At the thought nothing it wants may exist
Behind that fog; there's only a clenched fist
And a flood of emotions overspilled.

Come twilight rainfall washes through the void.
Every idea is reduced into light,
Sound, senses, perceptions and paranoid 
Formulations for the brain to ignite
And cloud over again what we should see:
Not that it is there, but that it could be.

The Pond and its Birds

These birds that live on the banks of the pond
Are the reason we give thanks to the pond.

The muscovy ducks with their feather coats
Brass-green as the waters flanking the pond;

The poking beaks of the white ibises 
Who sometimes descend in ranks on the pond;

The tall, fluffy wood stork we wish to hug,
Who with lengthy gray beak shanks through the pond;

The cormorant who spreads its wings to dry
On the bridge's wooden planks at the pond;

The limpkin dappled with brown and white spots
Eating the mollusks it yanks from the pond;

The great white egret and grand herons gray
Who wade with their legs so lank through the pond;

And Lefty the mallard, though he can't fly,
His personality anchors the pond.

So prays the ♡ and W who trace
All that they love in this tranquillest pond.