From the Land of Maple to the Jersey Shore, bufflehead ducks flip the calendar into autumn. They bob over lagoons, sketching rings on glassy mirrors. Wrapped in fluff, crow-sized darlings barely weigh a pound. Boys flash black and white, necks and crowns glinting green and violet. Girls stay shy in quiet brown, cheeks and breasts blushing a whisper of white. Drifting with easy charm, they follow their towering local cousins: swans, Canada geese, mallards. One second they dip down, the next they pop up in an unexpected spot. North America’s tiniest diving ducks lead a double life, half into the peaceful depths. I trace the rings they draw; my eyes keep losing the artists. Their bright energy startles my heart; I ache to borrow an ounce of it. When spring answers, they rise and glide north, back to wide, waiting lands. Crossing borders on wings alone, they bring no papers, no stamps—only the seasons charting their flyway. I often wonder what it feels like to be so light: to dive and slip beneath the waves, leaving the heavens above, and to soar and carry the open sky, leaving the earth below.
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Li Ruan, born and raised in Beijing, China, is a Manhattan-based educational consultant, immigrant poet, and writer. Her work has appeared in Restless Books, Assignment Literary Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Hamilton Stone Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, Panorama, The New York Times, ONE ART’s IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems, and elsewhere.