Invention

Imagine a pond. Better: a bog, muskeg
Filled with sphagnum, wet rot lined by stunted pines,
Visited by beavers, home to agaric
Mushrooms and poisonous others. Here's your mind.

The water is not alive, not the same way
The dense, dark, decomposing vegetation
And compressed flesh remains forever alive.
Water is water, but life accumulates

In layers that each environment allows,
Invents inevitable allowances
Inventing new environments, in which you
Become inextricable from the water

That is never inextricable from you.
Now, ask the bog its individual soul.
Everything self-invented was imported,
But each little community is unique,

A transaction coterminous with seasons
And bound to turn different, then to vanish.
So much sediment neither water nor soil,
Invented but continuous, moving on.