“Crossing the Swamp"Here is the endlesswet thickcosmos, the centerof everything—the nuggetof dense sap, branchingvines, the dark burredfaintly belchingbogs. Hereis swamp, hereis struggle,closure—pathless, seamless,peerless mud. My bonesknock together at the palejoints, tryingfor foothold, fingerhold,mindhold oversuch slick crossings, deephipholes, hummocksthat sink silentlyinto the black, slackearthsoup. I feelnot wet so much aspainted and glitteredwith the fat grassymires, the richand succulent marrowsof earth—a poordry stick givenone more chance by the whimsof swamp water—a boughthat still, after all these years,could take root,sprout, branch out, bud—make of its life a breathingpalace of leaves.”

“My feet are wet,” said Mr. Dreary. “You lack the proper gear,” I said. We teetered along a trickle of land that wound between water and mud. “Here in the swamp, even the swans wear rubber boots.”

“Once when I was younger I went out and sat under the sky and looked up and asked it to take me back. What I should have done was gone to the swamp and bog and ask them to bring me back because, if anything is, mud and marsh are the origins of life. Now i think of the storm that made chaos, that the storm opened a door. It tried to make over a world the way it wanted it to be. At school I learned that storms create life, that lightning, with its nitrogen, is a beginning; bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It's into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time.”

“The soy is seeping through the material like a BP oil slick in a Louisiana swamp.”

“With women, my wiring shorts out. My senses respond to the physical and the chemical, the scent and sheen of her. Evil could not possibly reside in the form of this angel. Or could it? Sure, I'm politically incorrect. I admit it; I confess; guilty as charged. I am, Your Honor, the lowest of the species, still wet from the swamp, webbed feet fossilized in the mud. I am a Man!”

“To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”