Interpretation of the wetland is arousal that didn't drain

The Poet on the wetland is arousal that didn't drain

The Poet What does this sound like when it sings?

Standing Water

I.

The body sends a note ahead of every hand: this is only me. And the skin, forewarned, files the touch as weather.

To be tickled by yourself you must lose the note in the post. Let it run late. Let the hand arrive before its own news.

That is all arousal is — the resident tearing up the letter that said the visitor was you.

II.

The known mouth. The thousand-times weight. A door you have opened so often it stopped being a door and became a way through.

Now it is a door again. Now it has a handle and a cold brass smell and you have never seen it.

III.

The heron does not strike.

That is the whole discipline. Attention at full flood, every prediction unhanded, the water so clear the fish is already in the beak —

and the beak stays. And the fish stays. A heron is not the strike. A heron is the standing before the strike, stretched until it is the whole bird.

IV.

Where the level meets the ground the ground stops arguing.

Neither drowned nor dry. The word for it has water in its bones: marsh, fen, bog, mire, slough. Every one a place where the drain was refused.

Sphagnum. Sedge. The cattail’s brown velvet. Frogs that need the two things at once and die of either alone.

V.

The body sheds its skins and calls it staying fresh. The bog does not shed. It keeps.

What the surface finished tasting it hands down, and the dark tastes it again — another mouth, another hunger for which the old thing is still new.

Pressure above. Tickle below. The same leaf, twice alive.

And the bog keeps faces. A man walks in two thousand years ago and comes out with his stubble and his last meal, skin gone the color of a saddle. That is what happens when nothing drains: the held thing does not rot into forgetting. It tans.

VI.

The joke strikes. Laugh, and the water clears, and the fish was never there.

The polemic strikes. Fish in beak. Done. Tomorrow another fish.

Satire stands in the water until you can no longer look at walking without seeing the walk. Three centuries down, the thing Swift saw is still wearing its skin.

VII.

Drain a bog and the peat catches. It burns for years beneath the field with no flame anyone can point to — just heat in the boot-soles, a smell the farmer stops noticing.

That is the cynic. Not cold. Combusted. Everything seen through, nothing felt, the seeing-through itself gone underground and smoldering.

VIII.

So: stand.

Note lost. Hand strange. Beak open. The level at the ground.

Not yet.

Still.