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.

Copyright Credit: Ben Belitt, “On Quaking Bog” from Nowhere But Light (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970). Used by permission of the Estate of Ben Belitt.

Source: This Scribe My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt (Louisiana State University Press, 1998)