Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine poet laureate.

In today’s poem Rachel Flynn of Gorham combines a description of a merganser on a lake with a commentary about persistence.

On Wanting Only One Thing

By Rachel Contreni Flynn

For Patrick

This morning the hooded merganser

appears lazy on the lake, puckered feet tucked

beneath her rump so she’s just coasting,

just carving with the cargo of her body

a sloppy channel through snake grass,

silent as a handbag. The merganser pays

no attention to kites swooping in the spruce,

loons keening in the coves, or cormorants

airing their wings on the shore. The merganser

never swivels her head for sleep or grief

or even grooming, so it seems she might be stupid

or nearly dead. But then, at the bright twist

of fin beneath her, her soul becomes a syringe.

She unhinges her joints into sleek steel,

plunges through cold water, small heart soaring,

mind clenched behind hopeful, topaz eyes.

Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2005 Rachel Contreni Flynn. Reprinted from “Ice, Mouth, Song,” Tupelo Press, 2005, by permission of Rachel Contreni Flynn. Questions about Take Heart, which is no longer accepting submissions, may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207- 228-8263. “Take Heart: Poems from Maine,” an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.