visions versions shangrila

one foot into the water and the mud took to pulling at the heel at each step picking up a fraught slack and looking each few hundred yards for ticks the farther into the cattails that denote a swamps lost of beavers left over fields and stickers with a pretense to colonize the new turf and here we walk, stopping ever so often to take in the soft sky and the farther reaches of pines on the ridges either side

the logs topple and rot
while some do not
and of the toughest rocks
too the moss most are lost