Bad Creek, Pointe Mouillee, Early December

I can’t imagine any creek being anything
but good. Who names any body of water bad?
I’m here to tell you that everything here
is beautiful. The marsh grass. The dead cattails.
The milkweed pods gone to seed. Even the phragmites
that do not belong here. I reach out to touch all of it
with my eyes. Not even the dead coyote
that killed his fair share of mute swans is anything bad.
The sky about to rain is only good. The new mud
on my boots is what these boots were made
for walking through. The gunshots in the distance
can’t help the sound they make. The silence
forgives them. As do the ducks in mid-flight that fall
out of the air. All of this is like water moving or other water
standing dead. The eagle’s nest in the stand of dead cottonwoods,
even with no birds in it, is never empty. If we can see it
or hear it means we are alive and that somewhere the sun is shining.
So what if the red shotgun shell I toe with my boot will be here
when I’m not? So will this stretch of water. So will this gray sky.

-Peter Markus

What I Am and What I Am Not Seeing

At the marsh today the dead coyote
was a fresh kill even though it was already
starting to smell. Something
had taken off the head. I’m thinking
it was a twelve-gauge shotgun, though maybe
some birds—crows—had been picking
at that open hole since first light.
We kept walking, my dog Moonshine and I,
though we often like to turn around
whenever we come upon something dead:
a dead fish, a dead swan, dead muskrats.
This time we moved on through the morning fog
in search of whatever else was still alive.
It’s true the muskrat numbers are down this winter.
On our six-mile hike out onto the levees
I counted only thirteen new huts
made out of bulrush and cattail stalks.
Last year there were hundreds,
too many houses to count. Who knows
what’s going on when it comes to nature
and the visible gods that rule that other world.
I know a guy who runs traplines here at Pointe Mouillee.
I’m sure he’ll know the reason why, or at least
will have a theory about it. Maybe
it’s got something to do with the lack of rain
last summer, or how the phragmites
have taken over the sloughs. Meanwhile,
I’ll keep moving, not knowing much
about what I am and what I am not seeing.
When we reach the end of what locals
around here call the banana dike,
I’ll stop and turn around. The lighthouse
on our left will be on our right.
We’ll be looking upriver. I do know
the names of the islands I see in the distance:
Celeron and Sugar, Stony and Calf.
The coyote was only a coyote.
Not a beloved dog named after the moon.
Like us, before it was dead it had been
walking nonchalantly along the edges
of a flooded cornfield until suddenly
it was not. Now it lives here in the afterlife
of this poem. May it find a small bit of grace.

-Peter Markus