Old Frogs

for Norman MacCaig

I take some comfort from old frogs
who squat around the pond
like Bodhisatvas, contemplating
nothing but their own exclusion
from the world beyond them, falling
deeper into selfless
silence and the dereliction
of all duty but to sit like this,
apart from offspring
leaping in the air or falling
through their parachutes of flesh
or dying on the road like Jesus,
with their arms outstretched.
Articulate composure
is their mode, as unheroic as
the rocks around them,
clumped and cooling as the night comes on.