Saturday Poem

ALIEN

In the animal room at the museum
a brilliant green and white frog, immense,
from Argentina: an inverted bowl
with no legs, another incarnation of Buddha.

You have the skull of the previous one
in a small box: a treasure any boy
would envy. Five holes at the top
form a pattern like a sand dollar's.
I lift it and press it to my ear.
The jungle, not the ocean.

The brain case tiny, inversely related
to the size of the jaw.
Teeth like little razors,
a mouthful of suicides.

I held the skull up
to the frog's eye.
It blinked, once.
No detectable recognition,
or one so deep, amphibian
to amphibian, I couldn't sense it.
All these channels of communication,
invisible.

They are what we've lost
or never had.

The geckos are powder blue with rust
and tan markings: jewels, tattoos,
beauty marks.

Nothing human matches this kind of beauty.

They drifted here from outer space
or we did.
One of us is alien.

From The Fabulous Disguise of Ourselves (1986) by Jan Conn.