We Find a Spotted Salamander . . .

Welcome to Red Eft Editions!  We've chosen this logo for our venture in mixed-media collaboration because the Red Eft (or Eastern Newt) has long intrigued us with its ability to pursue a uniquely “double-life” on land and beneath the water.  So in our own pursuit of artistic adaptation in the digital age, we’re here presenting our personal blend of naturalistic poetry and painting in the contemporary “habitat” of the internet.

Here, then, is our first video-collaboration inspired by the visual wonder and moving fate of another member of the salamander world, the Spotted — a local
species we've ritually walked to witness mating in our flashlight beam, on those first warm nights of February rain, in a neighbor’s temporary pond.   

We Find a Spotted Salamander, Drowned . . .

                               Before you praise Spring’s advent note

                               What capers the mad wind may cut:

                               To cast the flowers to the waves

                               And overturn the fishing boat.

                                                                      — Tu Fu

We find a spotted salamander

                                           drowned

in violent storm the night before,

                                   tail stiffly poking

from its matted bier of risen silt

          and weed.

                              Odd surprise to spot

her rubbery coldness—there:   

                          in the vernal pool

we walk to on spring evenings

       to observe new life.

                                         Now rake

       its bloated corpse to pondside

with a fallen branch

               through sable sheets

       of floating scum — in the twilit

glimmer of the stirred-up pond —

                              to probe its fate

       more closely.  Amazed

by the luminous stream of eggs

                                 still oozing 

       from her birth canal

              and clustered round her limp

back legs and slate-blue tail,

                                     like perseids

      bejeweling the numbed heavens

after chaos.

*An earlier version appeared in Dimming Radiance: Poems and Prose Parables

[Wind Publications, 2008]  //  The present version is forthcoming in Back to the Source: 

Selected Poems & Parables (1980-2013)  [San Francisco Bay Press, 2015]