In the Heat of the Belly

I swim in the clean and the cold of the mountain stream. I come down from the mountain in the stream. I am a trout, the color of silver and of rainbows. I swim, and I leap in the morning which glints on the water in the filigree patterns of leaves. The morning glances, pale and cool, off my armored skin. I swim in the stream. Clean, cold, I am the stream. But there is a place in my belly of warmth. There is a place in the belly of the stream, in the bed of the stream, with warm mud and wriggling things. I flow down in the downstream. I transform in the waters as I go down through the waters growing warm. The stream flows down. I flow with it to the warm waters of the swampland. I transform in the waters, shed my scales in the stream. My scales become the light and the foam in the currents. I grow skin in the warming waters. I grow barbels from my chin. I change my mouth and my fins. I follow my stream until my stream has been transformed, flowing out across the land, between the roots of great trees and the lilies and the cattails. I am transformed. I am a catfish, bottom feeding. Down in the warmth of the belly mud clinging to my mucus-layered-over skin. I suck the algae and the mollusks and the minnows in my mouth. I kiss the wet earth, every hot, soft inch to the rhythm of cicadas and frogs when they sing. There is a place in my belly of heat. It tells me things. I will get caught. I will be skinned and filleted. I will be battered and fried and plated. I will be placed between teeth and masticated. I will be swallowed, digested in the heat and the belly’s acid. I will become feces, which will flow in the waters to the deep places. I will be mud. Not yet. For now, I swim in the swamp, burrowing down in the dead old leaves at the bottom. I will be snapped in the jaws of a gator, big, hungry, ancient. She will break me down, skin from bone from slime from guts, and I will come out in little pieces in each of her eggs. I will ride in her mouth as her young un-remembering. Not yet. For now, I lay my eggs in the silt and sludge, release my milt, and I wait. The heat in my belly tells me I will get caught unawares in too small a puddle as it dries in the sun. The mud will dry and crack, so my skin. Not yet. One day I will grow limbs. Not yet. For now, I feast in the muck and I swim.