December, a weekday, no one else crossing (by way of the wet path) the bird sanctuary's yellow spongy bottomland, no duckweed any longer willow-greenfor now, the almost smoldering gas-lacy water says, it's down making turions. The way to be introduced to it is first to meet nothing. In rain a thin microscope-specimen rain. One raises a face to flooded sketchlike territories of trees, sepia, seeping; to blunt, upward bluffs of ivy, bared poison oak; a soaking place, fed by springs and floods, shallow water table strained by willows. In spring, in a more forward month, yellow-red willow-bud husks will sharpen the trail, their old pen tips, oleo-spot gulls' beaks, brighten the flat brown pond, and a man with a knife, whack, whack, righthanded down the path, will kill new twigs too new yet to be woody. But there's no duckweed until the summer when finally where a creek swims in, there's duckweed barely tugging the moss-strandy bottom, wheatcolored seed-shrimps touring in and around