The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews

 

Unknown

The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews

 

An ingenuity too astonishing

to be quite fortuitous is

this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-

lined and shaped like a teacup.

                                             A step

down and you're into it; a

wilderness swallows you up:

ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-

to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted

understory, an overhead

spruce-tamarack horizon hinting

you'll never get out of here.

                                           But the sun

among the sundews, down there,

is so bright, an underfoot

webwork of carnivorous rubies,

a star-swarm thick as the gnats

they're set to catch, delectable

double-faced cockleburs, each

hair-tip a sticky mirror

afire with sunlight, a million

of them and again a million,

each mirror a trap set to 

unhand unbelieving,

                                   that either

a First Cause said once, "Let there

be sundews," and there were, or they've

made their way here unaided

other than by that backhand, round-

about refusal to assume responsibility

known as Natural Selection.

                                        But the sun

underfoot is so dazzling

down there among the sundews,

there is so much light

in the cup that, looking,

you start to fall upward.

 

Amy Clampitt 

 

I know the exact spot. The back 40 of my childhood home, standing in the cutline that made a slash through our property, up to my knees in the muskeg. It's not really land that you stand on there, it's plant material who knows how deep. Is it "ground" you reach when you finally stop sinking, or has your weight simply compacted the sphagnum enough to give you somewhere to push off from? Hard to tell. There isn't really anything to call "solid ground", or dry. You're neither on water nor on land, you're in both.

"Wetfooted understory"  Clampitt has perfectly balanced accuracy and artistry in that description - sinking down that far brings the strange flora right up to your eyes, after all. And she is telling the truth - you wonder how the heck you're going to get out of there. And it's urgent, because the mosquito hordes have already found you and in a strange micro/macrocosm way you are like a bug caught by a carnivorous host and the humour of it only comes to you long afterward when you are back safe on your heavily screened porch, be-smeared with the contents of an entire bottle of calamine lotion. 

 A week later it is even better. Then you are able to read poetry and recall that indeed, the light in that place was beautiful, and the plants extraordinary. (Whether it was God or Satan who created it all is a question that lingers whinily way back in the dark corners of your mind.)