Night was coming, and so were the coyotes. I knew that Dennis would have been able to catch that duck. He had written in a poem in the very New Yorker that I was reading on my lawn chair: “The light under the poplar was mottled / but the shade of the pines was feathered.”

I disrupted the duck; she flapped away, realized she was hungry, moved toward the duck house, but was too wary of me to go in. So I went into my own house to watch out the window. Across the pond, unbelievably—but this is nonfiction, right?—the weasel appeared, scrounging around in the snow-covered weeds, making work for itself as the afternoon darkened.

I let myself out silently and stalked her, inch by patient, motionless, un-breathing inch, as she made her way over the course of two hours to the door of the house. More of Dennis’s poem: “We were bundles of self-canceling voices— / flight and response, punishment and reward, / hostile adoration, panic and certainty.”

At some point she stopped seeing me. I stood exactly behind her as she made her wavering way down the path to the dark doorway. When she moved, I moved. When she stopped, I stopped. It was like a cartoon. She never turned around, just cocked her head to the side—a duck’s eyes are on the sides, like a horse’s. The other ducks, funnily enough, were standing inside the wire watching. As she moved and I moved—a giant, silent step or two—they would go wild, flapping and quacking.

Look behind you! There she comes! That’s not what you think it is—a lump of dirty snow—it’s the Ann Arbor coat that reminds her of her nervous breakup!

But the duck would cock her head a split second after the lump of dirty snow stopped moving. The duck dallied, the weasel worked…and Dennis’s words again: “But still it was not evening, / still the world was ending, / always we resented the breeze / for choosing and marking us, / still a song too short to sing”…and then…“moved two famished sparrows / like pawns from branch to branch”…she crossed the threshold and I rushed forward, closed the door.

I have eight ducks.