Clade Song 9

Colorado River Toad

the largest western smooth olive epic
with prominent cranial crests watches
for signs in the sky or for this frog with
warts at the legs and chin to reveal an 
arid mesquite-creosote bush lowland
hero shipping into oak-sycamore-walnut
mountain canyons but grandmother
returns and never leaves pine and
permanent water found far from water
in nocturnal rainfall snow and summer
and when confronted will butt with a
paralytic poison ferryboat spume and
hoot from an inconspicuous sense of a
sun and water soaked gravel command