Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
We have just returned from a ten-day vacation in the humid south of San Diego and other southern hotspots. Looking for a synonym for the word “swamp,” for we missed the Delta breezes that chill our summer evenings in Davis, I somehow brought up a poem titled “Swampbed Confession” that is so odd that I don’t even remember writing it.
For this week’s newsletter, I will offer this in the stead of my regular newsletter, transformed here from poetry into prose.
Swampbed Confession
I have returned to the swamp.
I am drawn by the frogs, fattening and unfattening like slippery bellows of mud, gargling sonorously a deep chorus of gongs, soundposts of something primordial, resonant unending lamentation of bug-eyed mucous-melting minions, warty opaque dirge of the hornèd burp; a thousand shades of green scampering in thick slobber, as if kissed but then rejected by God’s bulldog.
The frogs’ loose-necked pillowcase bodies sink boundlessly into the layers of muck, a million years of mulch and wet decay. From creek bed to alluvium to swamp, the thick humidity hangs, sousing my unsteady march to the fetid, enveloping marsh of strangling banyan trees, while the stuff below us, bilious intermingle of water and earth, the creeping unfenced mulch, opens underfoot like the pull of one’s last days.
I march as if in custody to where even the dragonflies will not follow. Imagining here the onetime river, I must step over or into the waterlogged trunk of this onetime tree, now a fly-farm and worm-busy semipermeable muddy outline of dark and rot-rich pulp. You could almost dip your hand in, the bark now too wet, too indistinguishable, to clutch, to hamper reemergence with a fistful of that organic rot.
Something inside me has festered. Call it my amphibian center, my wet and cankerous soul gripped by pneumatic infection, something the last light part of me hopes could be abandoned here In the brackish, clotted water, something heretofore inexpressible, a dark thread affixed for an age to my internal demon’s degenerate anchor.
Oh that I could be unmoored here by this equally dark and sympathetic symphony. The sound of the frogs is moving. Something in the swamp is unclasping. Could it be the void? Release me. Release me. Let the gloaming ache be wooed out by the frogs’ heavy and seductive song.
None of this week’s Pub Quiz questions are about swamps. Instead, expect questions on the following: your grandfather’s choices, separated podcasts, American civilians, countries that start with S, best actresses, Whitney Houston, golf balls, ancient love stories, cereal boxes, faraway countries, American poets, two-digit numbers, trade associations, African cities, music collections, bayonets, exchanged letters, changed names, hometown alligators, broken souls, famous cargos, odd medications, nine-letter worries, U.S. presidents, chemical reactions, yearly events, news of the world, and Shakespeare.
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Be well,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
- Playful Categories. All of the following are examples of what larger category: Benoni, Budapest, Dutch, French, Grünfeld, Italian, Nimzo-Indian, Sicilian, Vienna?
- Mountain Ranges. In addition to Tajikistan, the Hindu Kush mountain range is found in two countries. Name one of them.
- Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1944, what highly-influential living British guitarist is noted for occasionally playing his guitar with a cello bow to create a droning sound texture to his rock music?