The Tamarack Bog

I met a man in a grease-grimed diner –
A grey, and hunched, and trout-eyed miner –
And offered a bottle if he’d regale
Stone-bored travellers with some age-steeped local tale.
An evil thirst impelled to slake,
He grinned, and twitched, and whisp’ring spake:
“Far from the City’s neon glare,
Where rise the peaks, ‘neath whose icy stare
Sourdough and coolie panned for gold,
A lake reposes, still and cold.
No mapbook marks its oozing shore,
Known but to time-dimmed Native lore;
An unclaimed stake of prairie loam,
Where the aspens quake in the breezeless gloam
At the edge of a low and level plain
Whose soil yields not fruit nor grain.
Truckers who pass the vap’rous glade
Tell of shadows that dance in black spruce’ shade;
No bird alights; no fawn does drink
From that stygian well of living ink.
The scaly birch and gall-skinned oak,
Ne’er shaking off last winter’s cloak,
Brood o’er banks, whose gummy clay and feathered reeds
Conspire to secret unhallowed deeds.
There, lone and shunned, its piles half sank
‘Mid the vines and mud, so queerly rank,
A cottage stands, whose windows leer,
Unblinking, at the lurid meer.
Hurry home, ere the red sun’s sunk and gone
And the moon ‘pon that glassy water shone,
Lest in those windows you glimpse a glow
That no fire, nor moon, nor lamp could throw.
If yet you should tarry, and gaze within the bog,
One look will see you vanish, wailing through the fog.”

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Copyright © 2017 by M.G. Warenycia