Ponemah Bog

In the bog, in the spring

Ponemah Bog

Something enormous seems at stake.

Against all odds, something is being born.

                                From “Pity”

                                 by Patricia Fargnoli

This bog is finally thawing, after all our solid winter,

                beneath early spring rain.  Two thin strips

                of boards have been pegged ‘round

                its edges, single file, like an old Contestoga
 

road to the west.  One way out.  There.  It seems

                you’d never expect to meet anyone

                coming back.  Maybe, if they’d gone off

                trail you’d see their ox’s skull bleached

               

by heat, a pair of sockets open as empty brogans,

                though those never on the trail, and never next

                to the fallen.  Where’s the rest of the once was bull?

                Why only a head?  Wouldn’t he rather

peat, so he’d decay at the pace of a bog,

                in the leisured freedom of aging heat—?  I day-

  dream, not about the ox, but instead, 

  the brown leather of a man, wonder

if one’s been buried here.  They’ve been found

              in Ireland, throat choked with leather cords,  

bog moss pleached between the strands.  Imagine the hands  

that knotted the noose then cut ‘round his throat.

Or a girl scalped by a turf-cutter’s blade (Heaney

                wrote in Bog Queen) and the modern

                woman who wanted it, the hair.  Listen:

                who doesn’t walk into

these places and see all the feet that have walked

                there before, and imagine their own shoes

                are those, witness or forfeiter, the throat

                of the crowd or the moan

of The Grauballe Man hung with “beauty and atrocity”

                all those B.C.E’s ago coming up perfect

                as butter, as peat, as spring beneath it all

though who’d know, in the middle

of this winter that's finally letting go.