The Alluvial Swamp
Dr. Andy reflects on the welcome humidity of August
August has always been a time of humidity for me, either because of where I was born (Washington DC), or because of where we travel every August (Los Angeles and San Diego).
I knew the musician, actor, and author Henry Rollins a little bit when we were younger in the nation’s capital. He and the MacKayes and others were always full of energy and bravado on Beecher Street. In a more contemplative time, Rollins once said, “August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame. That, coupled with the oppressive heat and humidity of my native Washington, D.C., only seemed to heighten the misery.”
I myself quite like August. We have recently returned from a ten-day vacation in the humid south of San Diego and other hotspots. When I would sneak out of our hotel suite before dawn to walk our French bulldog, it was already hot! I was reminded of walking our pug Spindle in the humid mornings of DC in the mid-1970s.
I was told that Washington DC was a swamp, but that canard worked better as a metaphor than as a proven physical geographical condition. My feeling that this designation was a myth was confirmed by a 2017 article in The Smithsonian, a magazine that came monthly to my Tunlaw Road home. In the Carl Abbott piece titled “The Myth That Washington Was a Swamp Will Never Go Away,” we learn that “Like many other early American cities such as Philadelphia and Cincinnati, Washington was built on a firm and dry riverbank. The land sloped steadily upward away from the Potomac between Rock Creek and the Anacostia River, then called the Eastern Branch of the Potomac.”
Nevertheless, as I was thinking swampy thoughts, what someone at UC Davis probably calls “telmatology,” I faintly recalled a swamp poem that I had written years ago. As soon as I returned to Davis, the land of the Delta breezes that chill our summer evenings, I rediscovered a poem titled “Swampbed Confession,” a work so odd that I barely remember composing it.
For this week’s newsletter, I have transformed this work from tercets to paragraphs. I hope you enjoy the telmatological inspiration as well as the transformation.
Swampbed Confession
I have returned to the swamp.
I am drawn by the frogs, fattening and unfattening like slippery bellows of mud, gargling sonorously a deep chorus of gongs, soundposts of something primordial, resonant unending lamentation of bug-eyed mucous-melting minions, warty opaque dirge of the hornèd burp; a thousand shades of green scampering in thick slobber, as if kissed but then rejected by God’s bulldog.
The frogs’ loose-necked pillowcase bodies sink boundlessly into the layers of muck, a million years of mulch and wet decay. From creek bed to alluvium to swamp, the thick humidity hangs, sousing my unsteady march to the fetid, enveloping marsh of strangling banyan trees, while the stuff below us, bilious intermingle of water and earth, the creeping unfenced mulch, opens underfoot like the pull of one’s last days.
I march as if in custody to where even the dragonflies will not follow. Imagining here the onetime river, I must step over or into the waterlogged trunk of this onetime tree, now a fly-farm and worm-busy semipermeable muddy outline of dark and rot-rich pulp. You could almost dip your hand in, the bark now too wet, too indistinguishable, to clutch, to hamper reemergence with a fistful of that organic rot.
Something inside me has festered. Call it my amphibian center, my wet and cankerous soul gripped by pneumatic infection, something the last light part of me hopes could be abandoned here In the brackish, clotted water, something heretofore inexpressible, a dark thread affixed for an age to my internal demon’s degenerate anchor.
Oh that I could be unmoored here by this equally dark and sympathetic symphony. The sound of the frogs is moving. Something in the swamp is unclasping. Could it be the void? Release me. Release me. Let the gloaming ache be wooed out by the frogs’ heavy and seductive song.
Every week I write a pub quiz and send it out to subscribers. Can I interest you in this week’s quiz? Say the word, and I will send you a copy to see if such a weekly challenge would interest you. Unlike Wordle, you can turn the Quiz into a dialogue to share with people in your local or socially mediated family.
None of this week’s Pub Quiz questions are about swamps. Instead, expect questions on the following: your grandfather’s choices, separated podcasts, American civilians, countries that start with S, best actresses, Whitney Houston, golf balls, ancient love stories, cereal boxes, faraway countries, American poets, two-digit numbers, trade associations, African cities, music collections, bayonets, exchanged letters, changed names, hometown alligators, broken souls, famous cargos, odd medications, nine-letter worries, U.S. presidents, chemical reactions, yearly events, news of the world, and Shakespeare.
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Stay cool and be well,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
Playful Categories. All of the following are examples of what larger category: Benoni, Budapest, Dutch, French, Grünfeld, Italian, Nimzo-Indian, Sicilian, Vienna?
Mountain Ranges. In addition to Tajikistan, the Hindu Kush mountain range is found in two countries. Name one of them.
Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1944, what highly-influential living British guitarist is noted for occasionally playing his guitar with a cello bow to create a droning sound texture to his rock music?
P.P.S. Poetry Night on Thursday, August 16th, features Charles Halsted and Angela James. Plan to join us at 7 PM atop the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, especially if you are local!