A Lyric Essay by Sarah Westcott
The Shape of a Frog
I watch behind glass as neighbours fill their pond with soil, muffle it with turf.
My mother asks what I would like for Christmas and I send her a link to a pond kit. Only your own spade and effort is needed, the website says. When the kit arrives the plants are wilted but not dead. We dig the pond near the walnut tree, smooth out the PVC liner and fill the hole with a hose, levelling soft shelves for frogs or toads to enter and leave. It rains, hard midwinter bolts. A day later, unbelievably, a frog appears, its body suspended in the water, nostrils in the air.
When February comes, I find the same frog in long grass and notice a reddish blush to its throat. I message local friends, ask them to let me know if they find any frogs in the road so I can rescue them. I feel a little embarrassed. I have a strong desire for frogs to couple and spawn right here, right by our window, on the other side of the glass. I loved tadpoles as a girl, caught in their trajectories; something, I thought then, like the transformation from girl to woman. Their visible gills like tiny floral parts.
A few weeks later, I walk out into a mild evening with spring gentling the air. Under the streetlamps I spot a frog in the road, its blunt profile on the camber. I pick it up, boned thing, and it pushes its head against my palm, tries to leap from the cage of my hands. I carry it to our pond and realise it is the same frog from before, a similar size with a rosy throat. I have interfered with its desire to leave our garden. Something shifts in me, like shame.
I go to the pond often and scan its surface for signs. There is no spawn but plants have started to push out shoots.
I want life in my garden. I want the living in my pond. I want spawn like gold. It feels like greed for a child. I want the pulse of life that is not my own.
*
There is a fable, a neat metaphor, which says if a frog is put in water brought to a boil slowly, it will allow itself to be boiled to death. Some claim this illustrates ‘creeping normality’ – a phrase almost too easily understood. Biologists say the boiling frog premise is false – a frog will jump out of water if it is too warm. The ability to change location is a survival strategy for ectotherms who rely on environmental sources for heat.
I find a frog carcass at the edge of the road near our home. It is splayed flat, and a packet of eggs, the size and shape of caviar, is pushed out of its abdomen with force. The frog is on its back and its (her?) throat is blushed pink. I have to look away from the form, then I am drawn back.
Her tiny nostrils are like this
' '
What do I ask them to mean in that darkness, that private space where she draws the world into her tissues?
*
This space is filled with the body of a frog which I would like you to imagine, its legs pushing molecules of water.
*
As spring moves on, I begin to bleed irregularly and freshly, my cycle turning strange. Eventually I go to the hospital for a blood test. An investigation finds my body is slowly attacking its own metabolic gland. The doctor prescribes an artificial hormone to take for life. I collect the pills in a paper bag from a masked pharmacist, who is kind. Each morning I wake early to take one small pill, my body dissolving the hormone into its systems. The dawn songs of tits and robins and wood pigeons thread round our home like a bower. I am grateful and dependent and chastened. I wait for my libido to return and I wait for the sun’s warmth. I lie in the sun, the shape of a frog, waiting for energy to sink into my tissues and bones.
*
When I was a journalist I used to write stories about health. Often I would write about type 2 diabetes and its rise in the young. Sometimes I would phone up a diabetes expert and he wouldn’t mind because he had a book to promote. He would tell me how diabetes could be reversed through a diet of exotic fruits and vegetables and a life of doing good things for the body and the mind.
Quite randomly, I remember how my mother, busy with many children, paid for an older lady to mind us. This lady had a pet budgie with a paunch that hung over his perch like a testicle. It was featherless and soft, like a marble in a silk bag. I can only remember him flying downwards to the newspaper-covered floor of his cage.
On the way to her house, a squabbling bunch of sparrows in a bush was our waymarker. I thought they’d be there forever. There is a housing estate there now and the developers installed a tiny playground – two swings, a slide, and a sign outside that said warning, frogs crossing.
*
I read about frogs with my youngest child. There are 159 bones in a frog’s body and they have no need for a neck. The magazine says they can see shadows and shapes but not colours. How do we know they cannot see colours? we ask.
At dawn, the windows are slick with dew and trees near our house are loaded with plums, pears and walnuts that have not fallen. The pond is dark and full of water and brilliant red bloodworms.
Some nights when the air is clear, I can see the Dartford Crossing from my bedroom window, blocks of coloured lorries edging over its curve, towards the Continent and away.
*
We go to a larger pond, a duckpond, and feed the flightless birds.
I hear someone talking about angel wing – the phrase holds a shimmer and I call it up on my phone.
Angel wing is a phenomenon in which young aquatic birds grow a deformed wing which lifts away from the body in a soft, strange curve. A high-calorie diet, such as excessive bread, causes the wrist joint to develop slowly, twisting it outward. Flight feathers, or remiges, are stripped bare and may resemble blue straws protruding from the body.
In young birds, wrapping the wing and binding it tight against the body can sometimes reverse the damage.
We return to this pond often and feed the geese stale crusts. They do not show signs of angel wing. My child eats the bread too, snot shining on his face in the keen wind.
*
The school letter says there is a case of threadworms.
As I fall asleep I imagine the worms within me, moving and digesting in their home. I am a holobiont, an ecological unit, a system of pumps and inlets and flushes. We are almost choral, loaded with matter. The worms cannot hurt me but I chew a chalky pill and they fall away from my body with ease.
What might I say about manipulating nature, about the desire to help soft bodies pass through danger?
All the other bodies taken, with force.
*
The white water lily, queen of the pond kit, begins to swell with a single pale bud.
How incredible that plants can make sugar from air, says my daughter. How does a flower, or a strawberry just appear? Sweet berries and fruit, the breath of us. We do not really understand, she says.
and, also, how do you draw the wind?
We read about a sea slug that decapitates itself. It takes three days for a severed head to grow a sleeve of body, a green frill. The slug’s heart pushes blood, or the slug equivalent, around its new tissues. The process is known as autotomy, beguilingly near to autonomy.
The hearts in the old bodies do not stop beating until they decompose.
*
Yesterday the lollipop man at my youngest child’s school was killed in a road accident. His name was Gordon and he was on his bike, heading to work on the road outside the school. He swerved to avoid a bin and a van ran over his chest. I am cleaning my teeth when I hear the rescue helicopter. I go to the window and watch the red, precarious contraption come down low over the roofs.
Today the school railings are lined with yellow flowers and notes and felt-tipped hearts. The teachers are masked and wipe their eyes. Some children and mothers are crying. A different man helps the children across the road. My son tells him Gordon died and the man turns slightly as if he’s been tapped on the side of his face.
One note reads Dear Gordon, thank you for helping keep our children safe. I am sorry no one was there to keep you safe when you needed it
All the bodies taken, with force.
Too fast, too fast.
*
I think about the frog again, the frog with the rosy throat.
If I write in the present tense, I wonder if the frog is still here
pushing back against the meanings I decorate it with.
I covet it with language
but it escapes, brute, inscrutable, unbiddable frog.
*
There's a beautiful white egret that lives here, on the river banks. It startles and folds up like a parasol with long, exotic feet. Once I dreamt of it with blood all down its white bib and a dark, opened hole in its chest, over the heart.
My daughter comes home from school and tells me they dissected a lamb’s heart. How big was it, I ask, was it like my fist? No, she says, it was smaller, as small as our dog’s paw. Hard not to feel the heart, our hearts. Hard not to see the shape of the frog, pressed into the road.
*
The root of the water lily grows through the liner of the pond. Water seeps into the soil and the pond puckers and gathers. I re-direct the root, patch over the hole.
I never stop looking for the frog.
Language creeping about, lifting it into trembling hands,
trying not to let it go.
The frog pushes back, mutely and stubbornly.
A resistance.
I cannot find it
But the shape might be pressed wet and pink on this page
faintly, discernibly, here and there
*
I am holding something alive in my hands. We are holding something alive. One frog. All frogs.
I am, for a while, speechless.
Sarah Westcott grew up in north Devon and lives on the edge of London. Her first pamphlet, Inklings, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry, 2016), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was published this spring. Sarah was a news journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance tutor and writer. Work has appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps.