So Far

Less than an inch long and not I suppose
an hour old but taking what must be
the flapping steps of the first morning
into which it has broken its way alone
from the white shell already beyond

recall it spills its spread fingers still
the color of the rainy daylight
across the dark floor I laid myself in other
years and other weather and scrambles
after its head like a kite tail but

not buoyant and the head besides and its
own tail most gray for a gecko a kind
of being which those yellow eyes fixing
me from the floor perhaps have not seen yet
and only from themselves know what they are

conducting as I see their brown body
of unknown sex and their pale soft limbs upon
a floundering lop-sided journey
as the only way for a newly hatched
gecko dragging its right rear leg after it

leading me to wonder what its chances
can be as it pauses to consider
me with my inches hours definitions
before continuing under the lip
of the square blue pot graven with lines

meant to suggest to my kind a few
leaves of bamboo and in that shadow circling
the sprouting cycad overhead with its
single frond and its ancestry
older than the dinosaurs but now

a species rare if not officially
endangered named for one man Rumphius
who flourished in the Indies a mere three
centuries ago and again the gecko
emerging with its gait like a collapsing

wave under the two-leafed seedling of the lately
discovered species of Pritchardia
that evolved on the crumbling island
of Kauai and I watch the gecko stumbling
out of sight only to sally forth

a moment later with all four of its
hands unfurled and balanced in its dance
darker too and decisive and see before it
another hatchling that looks exactly like it
at least to me and now what are the chances