I guess I am going to tell you a little something about being in a pond today. There is so much to avoid when you are in a pond! The surface is green, know that. It is slowly turbulent, it is the slow fat pace of a body of water strictly contained and full of things, full of clingy green plant life and full of frogs and turtles and fish, some of the fish are less avoidance-oriented than others, and frogs, god willing, will push their hind legs furiously toward you in their furious effort to move away from you—god willing! It is not nice to come up against a frog, you know the sorts of things that happen when you do! Warts are the least of it! I do not know how toads differ from frogs, I really don’t, but apparently they do, for they are called different things. Do you know what pollywogs are? Pollywogs are miniaturized frogs, they are for dioramas that tell the story of giant frogs, when giant frogs ruled the pond lands. Anyway, pollywogs can be found in ponds too, and children naturally are drawn to them, pollywog to pollywog. I do not know what that has to do with being in a pond, not if you’re not a child wide-eyed with wanting pollywogs. Hmm…what else? The surface is rarely shiny, it is mostly dull—there is so much that is unreflective on the surface of ponds, and so many skies that are the opposite of expansive, skies that push down with their low clouds to roll at the same fat pace of the water they appear to love, or at least to want to imitate, which is a form of, if not love, then admiration. Love and admiration can be siblings, but they can also be very distant cousins. When you are in a pond, your head is between these two things, between the body of water and the body of the sky, bobbing there, getting between them, keeping them apart, but only in that little area. But here’s the main thing about being in a pond, which is kind of gelid, I think that’s the best description of pond water and its motions, the main thing is that whatever it is you see on the surface is almost wholly recognizable, unlike what you imagine exists beneath the surface, and that can never be answered—never!—because the water can never been be seen through, can never be looked into (except if you catch some in a clear jar, but then you will see how many little things also exist among the bigger things, you can even start to see beyond the many little things, I think they are mostly white, to the vastly many-er microscopic things—it goes on and on like that when you capture a portion of a pond in a jar), as I say, you can never see into the water, and so there is no telling what exists down there, what strange kingdoms and phyla might consider women’s feet to be delicacies or objets of the highest order, ones they must—at once!—possess.