Turtle Eggs

What told me to come here today to the Salmon Club deck

and gaze over the river as it sparkles upon the rocks

and then told me, after half an hour watching the tree swallows

dart over the water, to get up and take a look down the steep grassy slope?

She’d dug deep, this snapping turtle, with clawed paddlefoot

a few yards downhill, tamping against the sides of the hole

the earth she couldn’t lift out. To this height above the river she’s trekked alone

to lay her eggs in the killing zone—the human zone, the skunk-fox-raccoon zone.

Now, in the sweltering June heat, she’s resting between contractions.

At last she lifts a wrinkled baggy-panted leg

and from jacked-up abdomen

extrudes the wet white egg, almost as big as a ping pong ball

tamped by her left hind foot deep into earth. Another and then another

each quickly squeezed out after long pause and mercilessly tamped down.

Here comes another, the seventh. And before that how many? Twenty? Forty? More?

Her organs must pay a price to hide them all.

Who would have thought the old girl had so much life in her?

The paddlefoot rakes back the displaced dirt as she stares straight ahead, pig nose

goblin eyes, then turns slowly for the descent, dragging stegosaurian tail

(which is us) down the path her ancestors must have labored up

long before it was paved, before history, maybe before

humans saw this land, down over the concrete slab, through the ribbed rock,

through the dried bottomland mud past the blood-red sumac stalks

through the bare willow snags and out onto the polished shore rocks

progress now accompanied by human procession

boys chattering praises to the awesome river queen

amazed at her flat gouged memory-scarred head

devoutly following turtle mother a little way into the river

perhaps someday themselves to be reborn,

by memory of her, from their electronic sacs.