Poet's Choice

to the highest tip and fly away home

to save her children. I wonder if little things comfort

anyone. Not me. The business of love is living big.

This speaker can't be comforted by the tiny pin-dot ladybug who wants to rescue her children, yet paradoxically he enjoins us to love big by observing the small.

Another unlikely survivor touches me in his poem "Frog."

My car passed over him but I could see

in the rearview mirror he was okay.

Then again, is a thing so soft ever safe?

Contemplating the frog's vulnerability, the speaker continues on his way:

I drove on to sit by a bed in Intensive Care,

where my father slept among machines. As if grateful

for wet grass, the frog wept with all his skin,

so happy, so helpless: not dead, not dead.

Fanning's sonic diction recreates the frog's ribbet-ribbet rhythm in the last two metrical feet: NOT dead, NOT dead. Undoubtedly, that's what the son's heart is hoping.

"Hospital Sidewalk" and "Frog" are from "The Island Itself" (Penguin, 1991).

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."