Raymond visited us recently and read me his new poem. It's well worth the lengthy read.

Muskeg

by Raymond Spiotta

 

It was a Swine’s-Elysium… the suck of mud,

the romp and wallow of it as we would track on through

the slobber of the saturated moss hedging the

sinkholes, our hearts swilling those thousand pockmarks on

the face of that broad bog…. oh, all was squishy gold,

and it was ours for all that unwatched afternoon.

My brother and I’d come up with Elder Ron, our dad,

and the occasion for our flying up here, up

to Mitkof Island, population 3000

all scrunched in one town, Petersburg, was that just then

the liturgical year had reached its climax in the

summer Expositor’s Conference.  The millionaire

fishermen of the congregation, Pastor Leston,

plus the lead pastor of the local PCA 

church, who had thought I guess that his but tenuous-

ly Christian “church” deserved communicatio

in sacris with kosher Petersburg Bible Church...

If there were any OCA or ROCOR outposts,

I never knew: we tagged no strata for those fossils.

We were let in, brother and I, though I was merely in

6th grade, having been only just thrown down this pit of

puberty and homeschooling.  I’m not sure, but

I think the book we tackled then was Genesis.

That synod seeded just one memory in me;

it was something the PCA pard said, comparing

battleships’ dimensions to the Ark of Noah’s.

My birthday fell into this trip.  Added to stash,

three books: After the Flood, One Blood, one more. Oh, I

was deep into all this Young Earth Creationism,

a pleasant polystrate that seamed dark slabs of thought

for moments when my mind would clutch at comfort, turn

from Calvinism to the milder dinosaurs

in Anglo-Saxon chronicles, or Loch Ness monsters; 

or, when sunbeams of truce would interpose, once paused

on getting my fix slurping down Puritan sermons

like horror movies, I would rove outdoors, pretend

that I was somebody from Genesis 11,

a pilgrim chieftain striking bravely out from Babel

toward a whole world washed clean.  It was a time for new

visions, these two weeks were: the Alexander chain,

its mountains bigger, I think, than myth itself, an un-

balance between the sisters night and day there, and

the way that suns would melt to slick and crease the sky

with hammered gold, would curdle clouds into ambrosia…

I learned there also other newnesses.  There was

this vastness in my heart that caught the land’s, whose lords

have made it so Alaska is the one state left

you can still homestead in…  And then, too, there was this

new drink, where broken leaves surrender all their blessing,

changing water into something so much more. 

These days saw also my first fishing – I mean fishing –

not trout, bass, bluegill, catfish: I mean Halibut.

Now, you don’t hold these fishing poles; this kind is bolt-

ed to the gunwale. First the !twitch! twisted the line

down, then I jiggled till it snagged; and I did battle

for that mud-huddling bottom-feeder, and it felt

like I was bulldogging a barn door.  It barged on,

thrashed, writhed just like an anaconda through your bent

intestines till at last I wrangled him on deck,

wrenched him from deep jade murk into the shock of day.

What launched us out to romp there that one afternoon?

It was a kind of sheer play, play ungoverned, there

was no, “I’ll be Nimrod; you be Melchisidek,”

no roles, no rules there, where the forest cut out just

a short march from the Pastor’s house, petered out, left

this muskeg patch: a day’s blank slate, 5 acres square

let’s say, a bubbling chemist’s lab and all the day

a pure experiment as irresponsible

as infancy or the government.  What muskeg is

I’ll tell you.  It’s a swath of slop made up of this

sphagnum moss over waterlogged plant rot in low,

slow undulations that are puckered all over

with swallets, these round pools the size of manholes and

as rusty brown, membrane to package all this sewage

cytoplasm to whose phagocytosis whole

railway cars left there have been known to fall victim,

slowly swallowed.  Here’s how we made our first incursion:

we shed shoes like snakeskin, so nerves could sample that

jungle fecundity – the fungal sponginess

of obsequious green things – straight through our raw feet;

we dabbled toes in one of those brown slurry-pits,

next, perched upon its soggy brim; next, dangled all

leg beneath knee, mammals shifting amphibian…

frogs in dire crawl-evolving water, we succumbed;

even Narcissus couldn’t get as hypnotized

by this pool too mote-shot to mirror anything

as we got, looking down, musing its depth must be

scarce more than two feet.  Here I Stand – or did!  Feet slipped

like lightning through the false floor of glum trub; I tell you,

we were butt-deep in this stuff till we snagged, our faces

breaking with 2-yr-old enrapturement and luck

of things unlooked-for.  Now adieu to cleanliness,

compromised, shirts shattled; now we’d go whole hog from

one to a hundred almost-portals to the neth-

erworld.  Jurassic swampbeasts, we had Dionysus

now to loose the dance; and all those sinkholes were

so many ants to stomp, packing bubbles to pop.

We fumbled out of each one like amino acids

from primordial soup, we tested each one’s depth.

They differed. (But they could not go below the bed-

rock, that so-shallow bedrock that makes muskeg muskeg.)

But our care was not then for the Eben Shetiyah;

it was all for the way this pseudopodded hogwash

glommed on our surface like the tentacles of that

stowaway kraken in the shrimp-cage we’d tugged up,

oozing like glue over the deck, with ancient, glazed,

impotent, lazy, crafty evil in his eyes. 

Our care, as we slinky-ed like walruses or lobbed

ourselves up like Leviathan to slosh out on

soft moss like neon gangrene, was all for the way

the sludge lingered to kiss us, like the overripe

smooch you plant on a baby’s face to make him laugh.     

As we plumbed down, plucked up, were half-drowned, got dredged up,

those sump-pumps purged, submerged, like Lethe: I lost thought

of all but how we were the only sons of Adam

here, and did my brother need a keeper? for

we both were free, and thick as thieves, as thick as mud

that clung to us, that felt just how “galoshes” sounds…

Gushing like geysers with our twinned, our absolute

animal brotherhood, we stomped, we dominated,

how we binged, we purged, squelching like liposuction…

I’d said I got a third book as a birthday present.

It was Desiring God, a book by John Piper,

and it’s almost embarrassing how much this one

book changed my life.  I had, I’d said, just turned that page

where all the words seem strange; my gums had forked stalactites

like new roots, and, next thing I knew, I had this tooth

for beauty.  Beauty.  Yes: that’s what those mountains were;

that’s what makes you annex ten extra souls to fling

thought out into the warfulness of Asgard, or

waft soft down into gentler Vanaheim, so when

I’d read Surprised by Joy I knew exactly how

Clive felt to be rapt upward by some moment’s half-

immortal Valkyrie to temporary heaven…

but here, I found another word of his set down,

quoted thus:  “We are half-hearted creatures, that fool

about with drink, sex, and ambition when infinite

joy is offered us, just like an ignorant

child who wants to go on making mud-pies in

a slum because he can’t imagine what is meant

by a holiday at sea.  We all are far too easily

pleased.”  And how I craved that sundered half of heart,

with all my dread of hell – to trade mud-pies for breakthrough...

In my first great awakening I had read Whitefield,

then Edwards, yearning for some fly-by-night forever

to punctuate my equilibrium and make

me make that quantum leap of “saving faith” – but there,

there on the couch where every morning brother and I

sat as our dad read straight through all the Pentateuch

to us – all, bit by bit, before he’d head to work –

there on that couch alone I’d sob to my dog, wishing

to sink down through its fabric, a Slough of Despond…

but this once I just barely felt the heavens tremored

by some heart’s-Valkyrie, and on this reckless

gust of hope I winged back to the swing-set, and swung,

taunting the hunter he would catch me in the end.

But here I’d be, then, later, swinging, states away,

behind the Pastor’s house, in view of Crystal Mountain,

frantic to splice rainbows and oceans to my best

approximation of the “glory” I was told he had –

me, a mere Messalian holding out for some

1st-Temple Glory-Cloud, a Manichaean lightshow

like I’d later read St. Austin fell for for

a spell… but what was all that flimsy dwimmercraft

to not be broken by the face then waked in me,

the face of Kelsey Schmidt, 1st chair clarinet

at Hubble Middle School where I was “homeschool boy”

for each day’s one-hour dosage of The World…?

What could usurp that face’s keen uniquenesses?

For they were like the dayfalls here up north, which I

would open my eyes wide for like a poacher’s sack,

since not a one would come to me again; I gorged

myself on gore, heartbreak sunsets like Ragnarok,

clouds slashed, and gilt spilt crimson viscera of God’s

huge love… but who that ferryman was I did not

yet know, Skidbladnir’s helmsmen, who might shanghai me

to sail straight through those clouds, old Diotima sporting

like some valkyrie mermaid about the prow, the sun’s

gold-vermilion sea-path a runway we take off from,

as she would teach me how to fall forever in love,

so deep you come unto this place where poles switch, grav-

ity backfires…; but no, I might as well have had

my back unto that sun, playing with shadows like

mud-pies, some dumb caveman; no phoenix, not even

an archaeopteryx, but just some shabby reptile…

One of those sunsets wasn’t long in coming now,

and so we loped out waddling under our bemucked

swaddling sheets.  Mother would be waiting. Home

awaited, my new drink waited to warm me: so

we changed our ways and left the place where the bedrock

had been so close, but not touched, and to Petersburg

were drawn just like a pair of animals.  And when

Pyrrha saw us, she smiled, and we got hosed down good, 

outside this house in Peter’sburg, and entered through

its cedar portal like new men, in time for supper.