Rana temporaria is Ireland’s Only Frog

i.  Inside - Outside

There’s stuff going down the drain

we’d be mad to drink (think detergent,

bleach, fluorescent brightener)

and somewhere near the outfall,

a frog

whose skin’s a mucous membrane

like my eyes and mouth,

where inside opens wetly to the outside.

ii.  Origami Frog

The brown paper square folds into frog

in all her damp skin, gold-dotted,

wild with grass and water, caught

by one leg in a heron’s beak or trapped

two handed and dissected, scored

open with a scalpel, undressed,

skin stretched and pulled apart,

pinned on a maroon-dark tray of wax.

As the live frog’s lustre dulls,

we struggle to cram it all back in,

refold skin over stomach and nerves,

stitch her up,  preserve the species –

thumb-smoothed, rubbed and stroked

to a thin and slippery tissue ghost.

Ex-Libris

I’m at the bookshop now, solace

impossible at the bottom of a box

squashed under other volumes,

displaced. I miss my place

in her library calm and dusted,

rubbing covers with a hundred

others: their silently tongued

gossip, print vibrating its molecules,

ink-atoms dry but driven, proton-

quick electron, the spinning

heart of the matter, my fellow

volumes loud even on the shelf.

My mistress elegant, immaculate,

running her ringed fingers over

our spines, choosing by Braille:

smudging sun-struck edges,

caressing covers, sniffing pages

as if she would eat us. She’s

chosen me, fresh and tight,

many nights more than the others,

slipped her fingers under

my covers, never bumped my tips -

skylarks have flown all over

her sheets, fluttered at windows.

Recently too austere in my pale

blue covers, linen spine… I’m

ready to be dog-eared, foxed,

tossed in a green bag with notes,

books, pens. Ready to be taken

apart, my small explosions

pondered, continued. I admit

to being shaken now, my end-

papers chipped. How I long

for a person to carry me up, open

my body, let sparrow-hawks out.