Wetlands

So thick with sphagnum
          a person more sure-footed than I am
can balance on its undulating surface,

          even cross from side to side.
Didder. British for how a floating bog
          quivers when someone steps

on the rotting leaves, reeds, and mosses
          built up over time.
What will I find in my mire

          if not the leathery bodies
of dead kings and commoners?
          Bent swords or shields

sacrificed to please the god
          of foul vapors and fool’s light,
the carbon-dark water that’s home

          to amoebas and Heliozoa.
Sphagnum fimbriatum,
          Sphagnum rubellum,

a humming starts from somewhere
          deep within and goes on until I can’t tell
where I am from where I began.

     

     

Senescence. A word that brings the perfumed
          fête of the senses to mind.
Then takes it back. Bodied, we age,

          like everything else. Our days,
a wetland’s centuries. Lately I’ve felt invisible.
          As odorless as swamp gas.

After a sopping acre’s drained and the muck
          is farmed, mint or corn,
carbon escapes, genie-like.

          For what would I ask, if granted a wish?
Besides dreaming the liquescent untouched
          as the fens were long ago,

waterlands, rushes and reeds for acres
          on end. What use coots and bitterns,
the great wild swan, any spirit

          at the threshold of the soggy underworld
I’m conjuring, unless it returns my dead
          or offers an old woman love?

     

     

Meanwhile, the sullen are sinking some place
          like the fifth circle into which the stream
of sadness descends. When it seems impossible

          to reach higher ground, not just as if
waist-deep in quagmire or quicksand,
          depression no longer a concept but a sinkhole

I’m about to disappear in, I remember
          the history of the Great Dismal Swamp,
how that hell was a haven for the enslaved.

          Runaways who marooned themselves
in a maze of islands and waterways
          plagued by copperhead and cottonmouth.

How, escaping, they came to choose
          scourges of mosquitos over the whip they knew.
Freedom—how curious, for them, too,

          it would sleep with grief.
In a liminal world, neither wholly water
          nor earth, they would wait out the war.

     

     

No swamp, this river of grass. Saw grass
          horizon-wide and, under it, runoff
in rainy season flowing out of Lake Okeechobee

          to the Gulf. Winter now,
all but the arterial sloughs dried up,
          a female gator moves slowly

across a terrain as bony as her back.
          Far north, in isolation, ill, I imagine
the male announcing himself in a voice

          unmelodious to us, the female bellowing
back. Still, who wouldn’t recognize
          the urgency of love expressed in their call

and response? Or the tender courting
          that follows in muddy pools.
How they circle and stroke each other for days.

          I will not die of what I have.
It’s what I don’t that threatens me
          on the anniversary of my husband’s death.

    

     

Peat preserves bodies long after
          the heart has stopped. Oxygen being scant
in a bog, acid ample. In the afterlife

          that is memory, I bring a spade.
I have come to his mother’s
          mother’s country where history lives on

in layers of matter. Women and men
          shuffled between aging pages
of moss. These days,

          remembering the way a snake
abandons a skin it’s outgrown,
          I long to lay my body down.

     

    

In a museum I barely recall entering
          I’m alone with a glass coffin
and my terror of the grave,

          bodies wrecked or silenced,
those buried in bogs.
          Sphagnum, their shroud

for millennia. Unearthed now:
          a thorax, arms. And two
beautiful, beautiful hands. A man’s,

          though fetal-soft and clutched.
As if all that time gone, he’d rocked in the balm
          of seawater where he began.

Hands like his must have loved
          a woman. One who wouldn’t forget
his uncalloused touch.

        

     

Half water still. Half soil. My wetland.
          Not the Celts’ portal to an otherworld.
What good is my diddering heart?

          The grief of being neither with
my dead nor without. Isn’t there
          a threshold the bereaved cross

somewhere beyond the circling,
          my endless circling of the lake
a great blue heron is skimming?

          In the shallows, muskrats build
their lodges of cattails and sedges;
          the egrets have long since returned;

and from the little island in the center
          geese lead their young
into water. On the mirroring

          surface, above the fish and detritus—
what sinks as quickly as bodies cool
          and leave us—I glimpse my face.