TERRY TROWBRIDGE

Remember salamanders?

On the Niagara Escarpment
(if you lived in Hamilton, “The Mountain”),
Summer (if you were in grade school, July and August),
salamanders lived beneath the rocks
too big to throw and small enough to pick up
tangled between coniferous roots and limestone mosses.

Salamanders introduced us to the undercommons.
Alcoves (if you saw Labyrinth, “oubliettes”),
housed swampy-cold civilization that solved sunscreen
with camping forever, slick bodies,
tail sacrifices to our grabby curiosity,
not with invisibility but with silence and escape.

Occasionally they would appear on the schoolyard
in the seasonal swing set (Spring forward, Fall back),
we experienced (March forward, mittens off, sandbox dig, freefall,
October back, mittens on, planet Hoth in retrograde),
fugitive amphibians would scurry when discovered
near playground puddles, dug up near surface-breaching earthworms,
sleepily salamanding on the edge of hibernation torpor.

The undercommons is gone, salamanders rare now.
Something about suburban designs all swept of limestones and soil.
Pinecones fall on shallow yards.
Sidewalks heat enough to cook wormy slowpokes minutes after showers.
The escarpment is dug up, trampled. Suburban moms call it dirty.
The moss recedes. The roots draw less water. The rocks mimic curbsides.
The kids sprawl on dusty hills that used to be toboggan tracks,
view the same tree canopy but without birds,
without imagining roots and the life between roots,
without knowing there used to be an alternative society underneath it all.

Remember salamanders in case you have the chance
to lift a rock for your kids,
show them metaphors for alternative lives lived,
be didactic about their habitat, resources.
One day who knows what fugitives will lose their rights
because they are too slow to get off the burning sidewalk.