POETRY

Our plans for creating “What the Lizard Said” began with a series of odd coincidences that made us wonder if we had come under a lizard’s spell. 

The first mystery occurred before I met Mandana to discuss her illustrations for our book – when I remembered a distant, painful incident from childhood. 

When we were five years old, my cousin accidentally dropped my green wagon’s heavy tongue on my earlobe. I had to get stitches and later my cousin was very apologetic and gave me a green bamboo cane from the fair and a tap dancer’s straw hat with a green band.

Recalling my cousin, and the hat and cane from years before, I realized I’d been happy, but that I’d never felt the same about the wagon.

The next day my wife and I went to meet Mandana at the recreation center near her home, to talk about “What the Lizard Said.”

At the shady garden entrance, we passed a life-size bronze statue of a boy pulling a real green wagon, identical with mine, but now old and rusted through, the way my wagon would surely look if somewhere it still existed.  

Beyond the lobby, in the large outdoor courtyard, the tall white walls were covered with many wrought-iron sculptures of lizards, each two feet long. 

A small real lizard ran across my wife’s path as we started toward the patio, where we had lunch and talked with Mandana about her illustrations for the lizard book.

The next morning, when I went downstairs to make breakfast, an eight-inch spotted lizard with a long tail was waiting at the entrance to the kitchen. 

It didn’t move, black eyes watching me without fear or apology, almost brashly, as if the house were his now and I was the uninvited guest. 

It was the first lizard that had ever got into the house, all outer doors locked tight.

Quietly I went upstairs to get my wife but when we came down the lizard was gone and only a fresh dark dropping marked that it had ever been there. 

A day later Mandana took a picture of a vividly colored lizard outside her house. Then she saw another lizard cross in front of her on the sidewalk, as she arrived to pick up her daughter at a yoga class. The cross-legged teacher was holding up a glass jar to show the children a very tiny lizard she’d just captured. 

Two days later in her backyard Mandana found a huge tailless lizard that didn’t run away but let her pet it. She took pictures of it and sent them to us. 

Its fat tail was gone, just a short thumb where the old, missing tail had started. You couldn’t tell if a new tail was slowly growing or if the stub of the old tail was all that would remain.

Mandana wondered if the lizard were sick or injured, or if the effort to sprout another tail was costing too much energy. She made a bed for it and gave it fresh food and water but in the morning she saw that it had passed away. 

The bronze boy, the old wagon, and many lizards, everywhere, of every size and age . . .

“What the Lizard Said” begins with a lizard dropping its tail and starting again.

And so, on that note, Mandana and I began our book together.