Imagine being lost like that.
Wandering, it must seem,
amid the possumhaw and bladderwort.
Sun-sluggish as the Spanish moss —
or descending into cottonmouth dreams:
submerging as ripe fruit into the river,
submerging into any current
that will carry you.
Imagine being exiled
by the sweetgum tree.
If once you went splashing like the egret
in the shallows, now what beckons
dangles from the snake-sprawled willow —
or is half drowned amid the pickerelweed.
