Sweet brown water, brewed from rain.
You slip in naked, off the moss,
soft sphagnum mattressing your thighs,
little amber stems pulled in behind.
The blank face ripples, fluid talk,
or gusts like a shaken tablecloth.
The liquid shivers back to its hovel.
This pool is the eye of the bog, made blank
by vastness, surprised by sky. It stares
past lashes of bog-stunted pines,
bark crumpled as warty pachyderms.
Pure wetness in a wet world. A door
through dimmed vision of layered peat
into the saturated underthought of earth.
Lifeless with the effort of reflection.
You are needed. To be a mind
floating in a cool marinade, warm flesh
soothed like a babe by droplet songs,
to enter a dark dream of mothering.
Safe walls curving down away into darkness.
Safe haven from the serfdom of work.
Sweet words echo up out of the brown:
home, north, summer-sob, sacred space.
Your gaze takes in the forested horizons,
remembers a burst of blueberry on the tongue,
the boardwalk dance of lizards, and the dawn’s
bog-echoing cries of wild cranes.
Summer-sob (Scots): “a period of frequent slight rain-showers in early summer, esp. in May”