Poem for the Willimantic Alligator
CAITLIN BREEN
State officials came up empty-handed after searching for a reported alligator allegedly seen near Eastern Connecticut State University late last week.
—The Chronicle, September 9, 2020
Everyone underestimates how big
a thing with teeth can grow, or else
overestimates their own courage in the face
of those teeth, when the jaws and the body attached
just keep getting bigger. There is no resolution
here: they looked but didn’t find her, and anyway,
most people were too concerned with the return to school,
the case counts, the closures, to worry about some reptile
that might not exist. It’s winter now. If there was an alligator,
there isn’t one anymore, but if there was—if the woman
on Prospect Street saw what she said, an adolescent, four feet long,
barely able to keep her teeth in her own mouth, an almost-pet
kept in a basement, in a glass case with a heat lamp
for months before her keeper changed his mind, or else
forgot to latch something, and she learned to shed
the ideas of pet and keep and enclosure like her cousins
shed their skin as they grow—then maybe this creature,
taken and carried and kept, made her way
to the river, not far from where the woman saw her,
or else the cedar bog. It might seem familiar, the river, the bog.
The water of either might invite like an open hand,
beckoning, one known in an unknowable world,
to hunt whatever lives there, to swim
just below the surface, to endure there,
in the dark water, until she couldn’t anymore.
CAITLIN BREEN is an elementary teacher and writer living in eastern Connecticut. Her poems have been published in Here: A Poetry Journal, Assignment Podcast, and The Passionfruit Review.
