Frog Lifeguard

i am a frog lifeguard

in the morning i take my coffee and walk
the perimeter of the pool
when i was a lifeguard for humans,
i used to blow my whistle and scream
"no running on the pool deck" or
"walk not run"
i do not think i would tell the frogs
"hop not run"
unless i saw a frog running
on two feet
then
i probably would

i spend my morning fishing frog corpses out of the pool
i am a frog lifeguard
i am not a very good one though

i pull out three or four every morning,
nearly always dead
sometimes there are big bugs still squirming
i save them when i can
beetles and spiders and bees
flies and wasps too;
the mosquitos i leave
they violate boundaries by their nature

my grandma has a ramp for the critters
it clips to the edge of the pool
so they can climb out before they drown
she refuses to use it because she hates how it looks, plus -
"they'll die on the ramp anyways"
i don't think she knows how ramps work

i tell her i will put it out in the evening and
take it off in the morning
so she doesn't have to see it:
she says "fine"
i forget to do it that night
the next morning there are three dead frogs in the pool
despite this frogslaughter,
i keep my job
i am a frog lifeguard

i think about the frogs in the pool quite a bit
they don't know its not like other ponds
there is nowhere to rest or climb out
jumping into the deep end
when you're a frog,
its all deep end

they did studies where they drowned rats in a bucket
although i am not sure why they didn't just
study the guy who wanted to drown rats in a bucket
since that seems more rational than
giving him
five grad students and
five thousand rats

they found that if you put rats in a bucket of water
from which they cannot escape
they swim around for thirty minutes
and then they drown

it is a good thing i am not a rat lifeguard
although i would help a drowning rat
maybe he knows how to cook

anyways
they found if you put rats in a bucket of water,
you get a drowned rat
but if you save that rat after you drop it in,
and then put it back in a bucket of water,
the rat will swim for six or eight or ten hours
before it drowns

it swims for longer
because it thinks that it might be saved
i think that is a depressing way to show
they figured out a way to give rats hope
just so they could drown slower

there is a psychological state called
"learned helplessness"
they found that if you take dogs
and electrocute them,
they cry and try to get away
but if you keep electrocuting them,
they just lay there whining

i am not sure what this says about dogs
but i know what it says about these psychologists
who wanted to see what happens when
you torture a puppy until it stops making noise,
and drown rats in a bucket until you run out of rats,
it suggests the need for
their heads to be examined -
perhaps several times with a rock

i feel bad for the grad student
whose job was to give rats a sense of hope
so they could quantify its willingness to live

was hope a good thing for the rat?
it lived longer
just so it could suffer more
drowned,
second chance always to end
same as if it were the first

so i am a frog lifeguard
i try not to have hope
when i see them splayed out
floating in the pool

but this morning i saved four

they revealed themselves one at a time
i kept checking for others as i'd lift each one out
and walk it to the marsh;
but when i returned,
there'd be a new one
i wasn't mad

tonight i saw a bear
it walked the treeline at sunset
lumbering gracefully along

i think the bear was saying thank you
because to see it was a gift
and for a moment i felt
held by the universe
maybe

maybe
i will keep swimming
a little longer

i am a frog lifeguard