To begin again, I come back to the swamp,
To its rich decay, it's calm disorder,
To alders with their reddening catkins, to hummocks
Of marsh grass floating on their own living and dead
Abundance, and wait on the shore. From my shallow angle,
Even shallows turn solid: a cast-off sky,
A rough sketching of clouds, a bearable version
Of the sun in a mist, the upside down redoubling
Of cattails, and my eyes, shiftless, 
Depending on surface tension like water striders.

What did I hope to find? This crystal gazing
Brings me no nearer what the mergansers know
Or the canvasbacks keeping their distance or the snipes
Whirring away from me, cackling, their beaks downturned,
Heads caught for my false alarm as they swivel
Loudly and jaggedly into the next bog.
Here among shotgun shells and trampled blackberries,
How can I shape, again, something from nothing?

Edgy and mute, I wait at the edge,
And a bass taking a fly—a splashing master,
Ringmaster of refracted light—remakes the world,
Rippling out beautiful exchanges of stress
And yield, upheaval and rearrangement, scattering
And then regathering the shards of the day,
And suddenly near, there, near in the water
Where he's been floating motionless all this hour,
The hump-browed bullfrog staring at me close-mouthed,
Fixing on me his green, princely attention.