from bog/prairieKETTLE HOLE BOG
glacial pool * arctic run-off consider 10,000 years ago, the color: ice blue / consider 37 years ago, the trail map: penciled now/presently: cocoa(ed) / enlarged pdf (a death related to effigy) creeping under / up from / out of / the murky, muddy-brown deadly parts, mummified in acid: horses, cows, deer (the men in town remember something much less tundra, lake bed ) & catching fishy bodies sluggish in clay, “horned pout” can survive extreme conditions: 90º temperatures / in oxygen levels as low as 1 part per million consider the acid water, preserving body parts: become the deer— (specifically, its parts: antler, hoof, leg) become the preservation of the body, this body: the outsides red & raw (of cranberries, pitcher plants, peat moss) this body moving towards a shade of scarlet, be this glacial graveyard * & TAKING MY GUN, I SLING IT FORTH & WALK INTO THE PLEISTOCENE barrel driver, sleepwalker, evocative somnambulist, I found your skeletal remains soaked in black, black acid. and feeling your saberteeth dripping grease, grease of tar, raging oil-drum fires, pooling night, drooling rush— (rushing) el train, glittering into the mouth of a pearl-less oyster, tunnel sludge what’s left of the shell— if not exactly a call for “wilderness” instead, a gagging cat throat, red, red fire hydrant resting— (red) silhouette out of the leaf rot my mouth mammoth: wooly & mud-colored crashing into the lake bed, bog-tired, into a coffin laced with webs of cranberry & deer skin, into a coffin laced with cranberries into a coffin laced w/ garlands of cranberry & deer skin, my tusk-tongue piercing the sky-blue mirror— and reflecting out of the water, I write this eulogy for a time. * SKINNY WINTER BOG to go no further than the rabbit, a beating heart under the still— (we are) connected thru sedge & spindle, the bog rosemary a sheet of icing over snow *
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