The poop marshes

   Remember that scene in The Two Towers where Gollum is leading Frodo and Sam through the dead marshes, and they can see faces under that water? The other day I was walking the dog over at the local farm property everyone uses as an off-leash dog park, and I was reminded of Frodo looking down at those faces just below the surface. 
   The snow had melted from about half of the field. The other half, where most people had walked all winter, was a large expanse of hard packed ice about four inches thick. Every four or five feet was a small circular pot hole melted in the surface of the ice with a dog turd in it, covered with water. These were not new dog turds, rather they had been preserved under the ice for the entire winter. As we walked farther, and the ice pot holes increased in frequency, it became difficult to pick a safe path through them. One had to carefully avoid them lest they attach themselves to one's boot in a kind of attack of the undead poop. I could only pray that if I slipped, and fell into the morass of fecundity, my dog would be able to pull me out, mumbling something like, "don't follow the smells!" 
   Eliot could have written, "April is the cruelest month, breeding dog turds from the dead ground."

   Then again, maybe he couldn't.