The swamp, a land of rushes,
a feral smell of sandy mud,
borders
on mental entrapment—begun as metaphor
(hardly a real swamp)
then becomes a place that began to pull itself
beyond imagery, become a real place.
To traverse it, to investigate, to walk its terms
demands a lifetime of tedious mud-trudging dailiness:
To understand that we are going en route
sometimes in rout,
sometimes convinced of purpose,
more often habitual, or
from several motives, private to each.
This demanded impossible discipline. Imperfectly elaborated.
To confront wandering, and to choose it,
during times of large choicelessness.
What choice? we have a choice? A wit-filled bitterness.
so cannot avoid considered ambivalence—
which means debating strategy
but not reporting the superficial.
The daily muttering.
So this debate is itself an allegory of swamp,
or a real slog, an image of endless heaviness.
And small bore muttering impedes realizing
the narrow spectrum of unironic choices at stake.
So is this picture real or not?
How do people come to act with purpose?
Perhaps it was sufficient at the beginning, then
it had to change.
And so unstable that the pilgrimage seemed perpetually endless.
Pointless? Only some travelers will intuit
A necessity for tedious, crucial persistence,
but many get impatient with all this.
Boggy, smelly when the wind shifts,
sumps filled with small inedibles and complaints,
Smug light will not suffuse enough.
But it is sometimes comforting, working together.
We are going on. It’s what we know.
Only our intransigence, ferocity bright or dark
illuminates the trek.
A risk, given spurts of danger that
sometimes encouraged rigidity
through wayward rivulets and suction.
No, not a choice we always made,
then understood and embraced commitment and even failures.
We had been enslaved. Now we alter the bondage.
Step by step redeem the fact.
The absolute presence of these reedy barriers so tall in the swamp
so wall-like over our heads and other narrow paths
slippery, unmarked— Each had to define and propose plausible maps
and convince others, but sometimes an individual
found the sludge just too rank without clarity, purpose,
and got covered with confusion and anger,
bereft of the potential
to think all this through, the trek, meanings, the tragic,
Knew instead, it is endless.
This thing we walk over and around—time, maybe or choice.
Loss. Terrain. Any of this is trace, and we are marked,
compelled to clamber through, and hard to evaluate
shortcuts—they only seemed to work for others,
never ourselves, we said bitterly. Resigned.
What is the possibility of the climb beyond—if only. If ever.
We think of dark light as a stain on stars
We think in ark light so can’t we just rest here.
This a repeated yearning.
not to strain so much on any pilgrimage.
We have had to find some will or spirit that overpowers
sense while remaining reasonably
sensible Find the will that extended backward, and forward
more than a natural lifetime Find when everything became enhanced
—almost magic, yet being intransigent, angered, beset,
stunned. Ill. Resistant. Moved along the path by will.
or just time, a particular lifetime, day by day,
the side treks, the main trails.
Here to find telling details,
to declare the usable.
Yeast from from each particular and saturated air
enters our bread and makes it rise.
Our yeast unique to every place we’ve camped.
And we collect these strains.
Together. Even if only this,
it might be enough. At least for a very long time.
Image credit: Thomas Sutherland, The Temple of the Flora: American Bog Plants, 18th century. The Cleveland Museum of Art.
