Swamp Sighs.

Nine times out of ten, a leaf is just not going to make it.
Still, places must keep record of what happens.
Every moment, incised in clay. The loam piling overtop.

*

I once knew a guy named Brandon—we worked nights at a ski resort,
making snow in the early season. Forty-something, former cokehead,
he beamed insane positivity into the wee hours of the morning,
and left his headlamp on when entering the pumphouse where I mimed sleep.

Under the concrete floor could always be felt the literally chthonic
grinding of huge pumps pulling frigid water from Cecret Lake.
On storm nights it seemed we drowned in stoned powder.
Night and mountain drew close.

*

Several times per year, the swamp releases noxious gasses.
Turning over, into a strange fashion of forsaking.
Is this a kind of enrichment, thickening, like brownie batter?
Is there excitement in it? Nuclear spatter? Constellations of ooze?

Nor have I ever grasped what amphibians do in winter.
They go into the mud and hold their breath all night?
What happens to memory, down in the rotting mulch, so dark?
What happens to forgetting?