Gary Leising
Worse News
Landing last night in Hawaii, the duck checked messages:
His doctor—Call me, I have bad news.
He drank rum punch all morning before remembering.
—What’s up—I have bad news. And worse news now.—Tell me.
—The bad news is you have one day to live. The worse,
I couldn’t get a hold of you yesterday to say so.
So there’s this duck. He’ll die today watching
A crowded beach of kids and surfers and tanning people.
His white feathers flush red. You ask,
Why a duck? I say, because you might not laugh
If he was a man who’d saved up for this trip,
Blew his savings on airfare, used his vacation days
To head to the Pacific where he’d die. And what
About the helicopter tour tomorrow he’d prepaid?
Does that future matter? The past? The present?
Why didn’t he go visit Mom, the way he always does
On his week off. And what about the cliché office girl
He secretly loves but never asked to go
To see a play, an art show, or eat a five-course meal?
Both she and he are shy, bookish, awkward,
And have been single so long that this trip, today,
Changes so little in the world. That man, what would he do?
He’d seize the day and take a surfing lesson—why not?
The sea’s right there, and he could spend his last day
Paddling out, then trying to balance all the way back to shore,
One endlessly repeated act he’d fail at, falling again
And again until nothing was left for him to do.
But cheer up, it’s a duck, no man. The duck waddles unseen
Into the sea and goes, paddling out. His body seems still
Though his feet kick like mad, until he stops, alone,
A small white dot lost, floating on the salty, tossing sea.
Bio
Gary Leising is an associate professor of English, teaching creative writing and poetry courses at Utica College. He is the recipient of a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and an M.F.A. from the University of South Carolina. His chapbook of poems, Fastened to a Dying Animal, is just out from Pudding House Press. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Blackbird, Connecticut Review, The Cincinnati Review, River Styx, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Poemeleon, Quarterly West, Sewanee Theological Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere, and he has published reviews and essays in The James Dickey Newsletter, Black Warrior Review and online at CLCWeb. Also, he was chosen by Russell Edson for the 2008 1/2K Prize from Indiana Review.