Two Poems
by Jack B. Bedell
Swamp Thing Explains the Frissons
If you sleep in this swamp as many nights as I have, you’ll see things you just can’t explain. I mean, I watched an entire lake disappear into an oil well. Watched it come back, too, during a new moon storm, leaving mastodon tusks all over its banks. I’ve met the red-eyed thing that makes prints all over Honey Island. Helped it scrounge for roots under the marsh grass. I even saved a woman running from town folk with her little brother once who could stop time whenever she wanted to. All of it simpatico. Especially out here. The one thing that ever got the vines on my back to crawl, though, was the night I watched an old man digging holes along the shoreline. He’d dig a hole until he hit water, then move six feet up the shore and dig another, until he’d made it a quarter of the way around the lake. When he finished, he threw his shovel into the water and walked right off into the lake until he disappeared. Just as soon as his head went under, steam rose out of each of the holes he’d dug and swirled together into a big funnel right over the spot where the old man had vanished. Even in moonlight, I could see heron wings, tail fins, bear claws, and hooves reaching out of the funnel as it spun. And just before it all flashed gone, I swear I heard Linda call my name to the trees as her hand waved out of the mist like a leaf falling past a window.
Ruskin and the Naked Hours
He knew every night, hours would come
when the demons revealed themselves
throughout the house. He saw them
in the burls of his bookcase,
the wisps of smoke above the candle’s light.
His only hope was to strip naked
and face them in his most natural state.
He’d roam through each room searching
for serpents in the tables’ legs, or shadows
where no light could find its way.
Once, as he stared into a devil’s grin
beyond his own reflection in the glass,
a cat leapt possessed from behind the mirror.
He caught it in mid-air and took
its fight to the floor where he grappled
this fiend for hours before he could rise,
victorious but so spent he needed
three weeks’ sleep to repair his soul.
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, trampset, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, No Contact, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, and other journals. His most recent collection is Color All Maps New (Mercer University Press, 2021). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
