Bottomlands Departure, and: Responsibility

Bottomlands Departure

This must be the place where sorrow goes, here where mud clings and dusk pools

in the lowlands in September. A few weeks after she lost the child—in the sixth month—

my wife and I lay one night on a hammock in the backyard, and she told me how,

as a girl, she had wondered if prayers ever grew trapped in their passage

in the hair of the clouds or the hook of the moon. And soon the sepulchral

moon itself appeared amid the trees, and I thought of the ghost milk

produced once by a childhood dog after not one in her litter was born alive.

My wife leaned closer while the stars grew slowly mired in their jar of formalin,

and alluvial darkness pressed down close to the land. Our bodies, we know,

are obedient to time. And, as night steeped around us with its murky tea, I closed my eyes

and thought of how soon it would be winter, how snow would fall soundlessly in darkness,

would seem invisible, even while we heard the lamentations of wind slipping

across the carapace of frozen land. And I felt my breaths rising and falling in unison

with my wife’s, and I thought of how it seems, sometimes, that it snows inside the body.

Responsibility

They must have built the nest during those August weeks of sun

when the grass slept in brown abeyance. Then the rain came

and brought cooler weather with it, so that when I lifted the toolshed door,

one of the dark wasps with its elongated body stung me on the back

of the neck with such a sudden and dizzying sensation that it might

have been that ancient toaster of childhood that once launched

into my body a vertiginous jolt. In the cool of the next morning,

I stood before the paper nest and the lethargic black shapes,

ready to witness the neurotoxin streaming from the can

and bringing on paralysis. But instead I removed the mower

from the shed and kept it at the back of the house, covered with a tarp,

then made a joke to my wife that I hoped we weren’t charged

rent since apparently we no longer owned the place. That winter our neighbor’s

dog—ancient, blind, deaf—got loose from their house and went wandering.

We searched the woods and the fields behind them, put up signs, notices

on Facebook, but not until six weeks had passed did the tiny pet—

still wearing its Christmas sweater— surface from the bottom of our pond

to float by the shore. I snared it with a net, carried it over to our neighbor’s yard,

rang the bell, waited. That same week our furnace went out, and the repairman

described having just gotten back from scuba diving in Micronesia,

where a local explained one evening that he shouldn’t throw stones

into the lagoon because it might wake the sleeping dragon, though the beast,

the local explained, hadn’t eaten a child for nearly sixty years, so they were likely safe.

I thought of this while cutting down the wasps’ nest in a light snow,

carrying it deep into the woods, then setting it gently in a hollow log,

in case the queen or others were still inside. I thought of that dragon

hearing the intrusion of the stones, feeling the commotion of the water,

and how it must have felt a certain responsibility to rise and respond,

to perform the expected duty, but then the task seemed like so much trouble

that the beast closed its great eyes and drifted into sleep.