Ode to Salamander

Oh, salamander, how your cool weight warms.

Sometimes I think if I was hungry enough I would swallow you down.

Four times this season I have found you under this same log, though many times I have knocked and you were not home. 

I wonder how long you will tolerate me, this dry giant, this desert god who keeps appearing unbidden to roll away your darkness and lift you up. 

But it is you who lifts me on this Midwestern summer mid-morning, too cool, even, for mosquitoes.

The sky grayed and I waited for someone to poke a hole in it, fancying all my happiness lay in the blue beyond. 

But then I turned to the here-and-now, to where last winter scattered my resolve like frost-heaved rocks, and found you again,

cold-blooded,

with spots like tiny suns.

Spotted

I zoomed above him, my wheels from his perspective like two dark galaxies spiraling by. I could see, through my windshield and then my rearview mirror, how he moved like a hieroglyph, like a drawing in a child's flipbook, this dark thing crossing the road. His body turned first one way and then the other, feet either forward or back, never in between, limbs all at right angles. I turned the car around and parked on the opposite side.

I recognized him instantly--the chunky, grooved middle, bulbous eyes, a dark slate color that to me has always looked purple: a Spotted Salamander. He lacked the two rows of large yellow spots down his back, a sign that he was new to the world--the waterless world that is--a metamorph less than seven days out of his pond, migrating to some mammal burrow in the forest where he would spend the next two years, coming out only nocturnally to feed on invertebrates in the soil. I felt lucky for this encounter.

He may never be "spotted" again, living a solitary life until one April night when the temperature remains above sixty-five in spite of a persistent rain. The warmth and moisture will draw him out of hiding, and there in the air a scent will guide him--a scent like mother's milk, the smell of her neck where you and I hid, as infants, our faces from strangers and then fell asleep. For him the smell will likely be of the algae that his mother passed into the jelly sacs of his egg, which bloomed in his own cells and has there remained, a plant living inside of an animal. It will be the smell of the first water, which, lungless, he moved through his gills and his skin to breathe. It will be the smell of the pond where I sit waiting for his once-a-year appearance. He will follow himself to himself.