Aroused by the way it sounded, fens—
compact, dense, with se~ret~ one could reveal
in a slow disclosure, a kindling, of glade, glen,
a flare of darker green, unbearable sounds
of water fingering through spongy soil—

you brought the word back in your steamer trunk,
a lens: one could see that the raw, prosaic banks
of Muddy River, if disguised, would emerge
more beguiling, sinuous, mazier than they were
in nature, if cloaked in nature, secrets sunk

within secrets. When you thrust the river underground,
insinuated in hidden pipes, your lagoons
unwound and languished in green, random spaces,
off-balance and shadowed, like the beckoning recesses
so alluring, in stone, to your neighbor Richardson,

of the barrel-chest, the vaulted bellow, your swinish
guest and dark familiar. You lived on coffee.
He dyed the air with dripping joints of beef,
chewed up blueprints and spilled out designs
for warehouses, trains, jails, wasting the night

while you dozed and schemed, another way to loop
two woodland paths, a pair of wooded rivers,
loosely together as if by chance, seduced
to a darker wrestle, in loam, in shadow, lovers
vanishing to reappear draped in more elusive