Wetland

Stems rose from the roadside edge
of the marsh, phragmites like the nerve-ends of
the Old Testament. The breeze in its low
buzzing held me to no
purpose, as if I were already
disembodied.
                     Nothing on earth
had prepared me. Words!
                                          A fluorescent green
damselfly with jet-black wings.
And another! And long strings of
conversation, done for,
dissolved.
                Farther in, I heard the sip-sip
of something. I thought of the water table,
tried to remember what it meant.
      Nothing on earth
had prepared me: the church
with its heavy jowls,
the school with its single vanishing-point inside,
its corridor of lockers.
                                  I was
locked in my voodoo drumskin, looking
out from a canvas that everyone but me
could take or leave alone.
     The marsh with its sedge, its hummocks,
its buttonbush and ferns,
skunk cabbage like a lot of limp
summer flags — why did it
do me? What were its first
conversions? Where did
the chemicals begin?
      Up, up, the cloud
of mosquitos sensing dusk, the signal. The brain,
the cloud. The slickness
of the body, its separate
sinking in the muck.


Published in Georgetown Review, Spring 1993