On Quaking Bog

for Jean Brockway When the walkers-on-water went under, the bog-walkers came out of the barberry thickets, booted in gum to their hips, in a corona of midges, their ears electric with sound, beating the stale of the swamp with their whips and flailing the ground for the itch under the frond, the fern’s demonology, the mosquito’s decibel. Night-sweat clotted their palms. They tasted their gall. The sumac flickered a swatch of its leaves in the lichens and venoms, a dazzle was seen in the fog as a vegetal world gave way to a uterine, pitch pulled at their heels and blackened their knuckles, the bog-laurel’s fan opened its uttermost decimal and showed them the Bog. Paradisal, beyond purpose or menace, dewed like the flesh of an apple with the damp of creation, the disk of the pond glowed under the dragonfly’s bosses, where a faulting of glaciers had left it—vaults of bog-rosemary, buckbean and Labrador tea, a dapple of leavening mosses soaking in ice-water, peat-wicks feeding their gas to the cranberry braziers. They entered the bonfire together. The moss took their weight like a trampoline: they walked on the sponge and bitumen without leaving a footprint. In between, in the vats of mat-roses where the waterline closed like a skin, the ambiguous world of imbalance, non-being, the pre-human and tentative, was one with the ludicrous. The quaking began—under their bootsoles at first, like a whale under ambergris, then cramming their wrists with a drummer’s vibrations, knocking their ribs and their knees as all sagged and rebounded. They lurched on the wet as though tracing a profile of breakers or displacing the cords and the voids of a net, and staggered back into their childhoods, till their feet touched the granite again. The bog tossed them over the threshold that opened a path in the spruce toward the opposite edges. The leaves closed behind them. They walked an unyielding and tangible world like strangers, remembering only the hovering glare where the pitcher-plant’s hammer closed on the fly—the light shaking and shaking— as a pulse touched their feet from below, and passed over.