Bottomlands

Birthright

This was before he understood that crickets
sang secretly and hopelessly of death. That chorus
frogs moaned forever of unearthly wounds,
that the wings of hoot owls churned the air
as suffering’s spirit. Back then he never held
a dying catfish as an offering in his palms,
never displayed a sliced massasauga snake skin
to the quarter moon. The great mystery
hadn’t branded him, hadn’t sliced him
at the belly to read the entrails, hadn’t taught him
to stand before the stagnant pond and know
the sagging weight of its green muck,
to scour the treetops for the hinged wings of bats.

Departure

The boy remembers his mother as the epidendrums
or polyrrhizas clinging to the live oaks
at the swamp’s edge. He recalls her hands
grinding the sweetbay leaves and bladderwort
to make a salve to soothe his fevers, as though
the alluvial smell off the bottomlands were an augury
or an occultation, as though the cottonmouths
he spies sometimes dropping like ripe fruit into the shallows
of the oxbow lake are his mother slipping away again
into the mist. It is early morning beyond their cabin
and he can almost picture her turning to glance back,
can almost feel the fog enclosing her as a pale cloak.
And when a wood duck cries out from the live oaks,
he imagines the sound being swallowed in the swamp.

Sacred Object

The girl is watching her older brother watch a vulture.
She saw him once kill a mud snake with his boot.
She watched him prick his thumb
then trickle four bright drops into a gray urn mushroom.
At night sometimes she dreams he takes his fishing knife
and slices deep into her belly to read the entrails.
By day he watches her near the oxbow lake.
Lets her swim only in the shallows.
Tells her to rub her skin with pickerelweed.
Teaches her how to watch the depths for snapping turtles.
Yet still the bald red head of the vulture
above her brother is otherworldly.
The bird remains stilled above him in the air,
rocking slightly, as though the wind is its own
sacred object, as though surely there is carrion somewhere,
bloodied and ready, and it can smell it.

The Good Map

Descending, as she does, into the dark slope
of trees, into the blue lupines and the wild geraniums,
she listens for the hoot owls’ cries—
then follows them into the oldest acres
of the bottomlands. The ghosts here
are quiet and respectful as a blessing.
They tremble to touch your hair,
ease close to share your breath.
Here is the map, she tells them—
then remembers almost drowning
as a child. It was Woundwort Pond
where stagnant water swirled inside your lungs,
where cattails and water weeds beguiled you.
There was a single moment when the world
above you turned its frizzy green
and the weight of water sank you to the fold.
This is the wonder of the body—like the scrim of sky
above the tupelos. You find your way.

Bottomlands Bride

The half-moon tracks were from a phantom deer.
No one saw it. The white woods were empty
in January, the way her sisters had grown fat
with life and then expelled it. The older sister
had almost died, and then the crying infant had gnawed
at her breast until it seeped blood and gave
the child colic. The phantom deer, deep in the woods,
lay down one morning beside the shriveled foxgloves
and woodbines. It gave birth to an owl.
The owl tore its way through the deer’s flesh,
using its talons to claw into the world. The young bride
had been married for less than a month when she awoke
to hear something moaning from the river,
when she crossed to the window to see an owl perched
on the limbs of a shagbark hickory. In her dreams,
sometimes, the owl’s talons dripped blood to stain the snow.
Other times she awoke at dawn beside her husband,
slipped from bed, and walked into the woods. Pale daybreak
gathered in the trees near the river as she knelt before
the half-moon tracks and ran a hand over the sloping
of her belly. Often the sky turned blood-red on the horizon,
but she never saw a deer running toward it.

Bottomlands Mother

Because the owl is a sorcerer,
the mother makes a broth from the meat
and spoons it into her youngest daughter’s
bowl. And because her own mother
nailed the skin of an owl to the barn
when her oldest child was dying,
she removes the hoot owl’s eyes,
wraps them in swamp candle leaves,
and buries them beneath the tallest
black tupelo in the back yard.
The tree, it is said, sprouted
from the spirit of an alligator
that attacked a young girl and then itself
was killed, which explains the rough
gray bark and the owls that always
perch beside the black-blue berries.
Her grandmother told her that to kill an owl
you must walk in slow circles around the tree
so that the eyes follow you, so that the head
follows you, so that the neck turns and turns—
until it snaps. At night, sometimes, she hears
the owls calling to her daughters,
summoning them, longing to lift them
in their talons to the highest branches,
wanting to bleed them and so turn them
into owls. “Eat,” the mother says,
spooning more broth into the bowl.

Bottomlands Rain

A single crow passes over his cabin
at dusk—and then it rains. He is alone.
The bare head of a wood stork near the lake
bows to accept the sudden offering of water.
The wood stork’s wings shudder. In a reliquary
beside the bed where his wife used to sleep
is a stuffed red-bellied woodpecker,
a prothonotary warbler, a parula.
The rain is as loud as an accusation on the roof,
and he remembers the story his father
used to tell of a white ibis that transformed
each time it rained into a woman, a woman
with pale soft skin and a long neck,
a woman who would fall in love
for the brief time until her skin returned
to feathers. Earlier the wood ducks
were calling from the trees, but now
the only sound is the rain pounding
the earth outside his window, staining
the black willows and tupelos a darker
black. As a child he watched his father
shoot a great egret then drag it
by its neck from the shallows. The egret
thrashed and struggled for a moment
until it stopped. The rain thrashes
and struggles a little longer until it stops.
There is nothing left. Later he steps outside
and walks down to the lake, but the earth
beneath his boots has already dried.

Bottomlands Wife

And so she grew ill.
And walked out mornings by Buckbean Lake. And watched
the heat rising through the pickerelweed. And soon it seemed
that every thought—thoughts arising, she imagined, as though
from the sweetgum trees and Spanish moss—rippled like sluggish
waves across the swamp. And each time she imagined
a cottonmouth dropping like ripe fruit from a black willow
to the shallows, or a great blue heron lifting itself on awkward wings
above the possumhaw, she feared that something terrible
was coming. It was like climbing from a steep hollow and fearing
what was waiting past the rise. She wasn’t sure if it was her husband
or her sons at risk, her sisters or her father, her aunt or her cousins.
And sometimes she sneaked behind the cabin and made a potion
of epidendrums, swamp lilies, and parula feathers; and sometimes
she listened to the wood storks bleating and bellowing
from the cypress swamp. And still each day she sensed it coming,
as stealthy as a bobcat, as unforgiving as the talons of a barred owl.
And when I came home last summer she was nearing ninety,
and her husband was dead, and her boys were dead, and her parents and her aunt and her cousins were dead. And she took
me down to the swamp’s edge where the black tupelos
stood tall against the sky. And she said, “Look.”

The Unfortunate Husband

The summer his wife went blind, the rain fell
until the stream behind the barn overflowed its banks.
The foxgloves and bellflowers sprang up in great
abundance in the woods, and the loamy smell
of the July earth seeped through the open
windows late at night.
Sometimes in the mornings
he awoke to see that his wife had turned to face him.
And when he was working in the fields,
she often seemed to be standing at a window.
Her habit, then, was to tilt her head slightly to one side,
as though to watch. And when she stood before him
every evening when he stepped back in the house, her dead
eyes transfixed him where he stood.
More and more there was
something puzzling in how she held herself before him.
Her skin was oddly sallow, and a pale yellow film—
like a thin flap of skin on a cooling soup—
claimed the iris of each eye.
The neighbors referred
to him by then as the unfortunate husband.
They brought food to the doorstep.
They whispered each Sunday before church.
His wife looped her arm through his so he
could lead her, but still he couldn’t quite believe
that she was there.
And then one night he dreamed
that the yellow film drained suddenly from her eyes
and once more she could see him—and what she saw
horrified them both.

Winged Men

She imagines that the men in her life
are swimming in the river, doomed men,
as though their flailing arms are auguries.
Surely they can see the willow oaks
and sycamores on shore, and she imagines
that the leaves and outstretched limbs
appear to them as seers, as though the dusk sky
is dulled as a final occultation.
Once she spots a green heron with a wing
so badly damaged it cannot fly, and once she eases
into a slough where the river has flooded, and wades
out amid the pondweeds, the yellow lotus,
and the arrowheads. The water there
is a decomposing body, as though death
is an oxbow or a bayou, and she imagines the men
in her life falling from the sky with broken wings.

Notes for the Novel

A voice is calling from the bottomlands
like strange weeds plucked from a dense swamp.
The bed in which he sleeps is like a ruined field
where not even the fireweeds have taken root,
where the terrain is as desolate as the discarded skin
of a cottonmouth, like the thin notes of a parula
escaping from the willows outside his window.
The night is as foul-smelling as a rotting log
or the green muck on the surface of a pond.
He dreams the wind has died. He can see it
stopped in the air, poised and ready, and then
it begins to rot, congeal, and turn to swamp.
And he is walking into it.

A Brief History of Desire

Like rowing beneath the bladderwort,
the Spanish moss, and the pickerelweed.
In search of the deep blue fruit of the black tupelo.
The morning light weakened from its passage
through the possumhaw and sweetgum trees,
the morning light as yellowish as the filmy mist
clinging to a blind man’s eyes.
When all at once there’s a commotion
in the distance and an offering of a wood stork’s
bare-skinned neck is draped
in the clamped jaw
of a cypress swamp bobcat.

Dutchman’s Breeches

The crows sit high above them in the trees.
Like the brown snake at the river’s edge—
the pale stripe of prophecy on its back,
the black marks of augury on its belly.
Here is the shape they cannot understand—
the smell of dropped fruit congealing
in heavy summer. This is their covenant.
Once they saw a starving fox chase
a field mouse through the hickories, the fox’s ribs
like the tupelo roots exposed by the river bank.
When their son died she awoke at night
to hear the chorus frogs outside their window,
the rhythm like the sway of the dutchman’s breeches
she used to watch as a child, flowers hypnotized
in the wind, flowers she used to gather as wild bouquets
for her mother. It is the unknown shape
the crows are calling now as they take flight.
As their wings impale the graying sky.

The Refusal

Sometimes she imagines her husband’s body dragged
from the cypress swamp, placed beneath a black tupelo.
His chest, overgrown with bladderwort and pickerelweed,
strains for each new breath. The flies are reeling in the night air,
and the sweetbays and black willows impale the sky.
Soon in the distance comes the sharp cry of a barred owl,
and her husband convulses and strains to gain his feet.
The smell of him is like the rot congealing in the lowlands
where the cottonmouths swim in the black and brackish water.
His skin is alive with worms, with wasp larvae.
The leeches cling as he cries out. He calls for her
to come decompose beside him.

Night Songs

He sees her as swamp candles
yellow in the mist in the bottomlands.
His thoughts are clouded as the fog.
Words fail him. Later he imagines her
standing beneath a black willow
near the oxbow lake. He notices
the lanceolate leaves. He hears
the formlessness of the wind
rising up from the bladderwort
and duckweed. His hands ache.
All morning he has been chopping wood.
He leans back his weight then brings down
the axe in a great arc. He imagines
the blow as half a circle or an ouroboros—
the cottonmouth swallowing its own tail.
Sometimes at night he dreams that songs
are hidden within the alligator’s nest
with its rotting grass and loam.
There is a fetid smell. The body aches.
And sometimes he awakes to hear
the chorus frogs and bullfrogs
lamenting from the swamp. The moon
is as yellow as a swamp candle
above the tupelos. It seems almost
the moon is singing too.

Hiding Place

His wife, who keeps the feather
of a red-shouldered hawk beneath her pillow,
imagines that the cypress trees are whispering
a secret. She claims that in another life she crawled
on her belly with the ribbon snake, basked in the shallows
with the musk turtle. Her first husband, who fell from a roof
and broke his neck, carved the day before he died
a strange symbol into the wood of the cistern, and the day
after he died she saw in the loam beside the symbol
the double-grooved tracks of a white-tailed deer.
The tracks approached the cistern then disappeared.
As a child she once had a snapping turtle bloody
her toes while she was dangling them from a rowboat,
and the first time she bled from between her legs
her brothers shot a barred owl and left if lying dead
beneath her window. Another time when she had a fever
she walked into the swamp and rubbed her skin
with white water lilies, and a few weeks later
she realized she was pregnant with their son, who hid
in her belly and whispered secrets she would never know.

Owl Augury

The barred owls began hunting in the bottomlands near the cabin in the weeks after he was born.
The sounds of them kept lifting from the black willows and tupelos, drifting along the river like a strange plea, as though the creatures were struggling to give shape to the mist that crept past the pickerelweed and the flowering wapato.
As though the creatures were trying to summon the cottonmouths and alligators from the stagnant waters.
As though the creatures were trying to transform the moon into an augury.
When he was ten he saw his first barred owl, a dead one, sprawled beneath a possumhaw overgrown with epidendrums. The epidendrums appeared to be
strangling the possumhaw. The owl appeared to have been dead for some time, decaying in the loam. It was hard to tell where the loam ended and owl
began.
In his fourteenth year he fell in love with a girl who had eyes as dark and as close-set and as rounded as an owl’s.
They were married the summer he turned eighteen, and soon she grew heavy in the belly and told him she was going to have a child.

When the boy was born there was something wrong with his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. He coughed and coughed as though trying to bring up feathers.
When the boy died not a single owl was heard in the bottomlands for many weeks.
His wife refused to speak of it, and sometimes as the years passed and he heard an owl in the distance he would imagine it was feasting on his son, that somehow the boy’s body had returned to flesh long enough to find its way into a belly.
After his wife died he was walking in the swamp one evening when he saw an owl high in a sweetbay tree. At first he wasn’t certain it was there, but then its head moved to watch him. And as he walked around the tree, the owl followed him with its eyes, the neck swiveling and swiveling. It was possessed owl—he walked round and round and round until the neck snapped.

Widowhood

If the dark gash of ravine swallows Abbots Creek,
and if in any case the stream twists and flails
like a coachwhip snake beneath the morning mist,
the sinkhole pond is surely just ahead.
Here are the black willows, the water willows,
the alligator weeds. Here are the pickerel frogs
that sing while submerged beneath the green.
And if it’s true that the human bones were discovered
by a madwoman, is it any wonder she laid them out
beneath the sweetgum tree? Listen to the accidental
cry of the hermit thrush. See the algae-covered
carapace of the snapping turtle. And if the pond
swells in the rain then shrinks again in the drought,
isn’t this the permanency we crave?
Some madwoman stacking bones into a pile.

Aubade

The alluvium at the swamp’s edge has formed
a body. The old man sees it from the back porch
in the first dim gray. It is almost as though someone
lay down there so turned to loam. He thinks, almost,
it is a long-ago lover, or someone he once ached for
from a distance, as though every new morning
is a sloughing off something dragged into the swamp
as remembered mud. In his dreams sometimes
he is standing in an orchard where every apple
has shriveled to the size of a black raisin,
where the vespid wasps hum around the body
to remind him of the interfering flesh. It is dark
beyond the sweet gum trees where morning remains
a distant contagion. He can’t stop gazing at the loam.
He recognizes the shape of what appears to be a face
he knows. The proof is in the ache of his old body.

Swamp Dusk

The old women are gossiping about the river.
They are imagining their bodies carried
by the current beneath the oxbow bridge,
dragged into the bottomlands.
It is dead summer now. The air is thick
and unwieldy as loam. Old men
are dragging catfish from the water
and slicing off their heads. The cypresses
are drooping as the veil of life.
The old women are thinking of the body’s
loneliness. Of the spiny softshell buried
in the mud. The river whispers and pulses
beneath the bridge where a young cottonmouth
is swimming with its sulfur-yellow tail.
There are voices in the river.
They make a mournful sound
that is beautiful at dusk. While the blood-red
sky steeps the swamp in glow.