Our heart’s a crepe myrtle in the earlysummer heat gleam
Bright pink and purpled bits, folded into themselves and drifting
One two three slow seconds down, ground graved of fire ants languid. Yes.
I ease off the shoulder back onto the sunrotting coarse blacktop narrowing down
Muscadine and pine easing in, time’s suddenness.
I drove through the town I grew up in today… well.
We are vessels of decay, and none of our
Works will last. That’s the resounding message in the lay of this land, let me tell you.
Even our memory, the memory of our bones and our blood and the broken banners
Of our fathers and our fathers’ fathers, it’s split to nothing and wasting away,
Its own weight and the weight of the sins of the world. With every hurricane
Another empty space. Ten years, twenty, even the shards of bricks will be swallowed.
I turn my heart to the sun burning off in the west. October comes, and the last bit of color
Is gone. The leaves turn brown, and cling to the weary limbs. Metaphor? It’s so much
Deeper than that, man. All our lives are ruins, return, and red with sword and speech.
Some of us have worse ruins than others. These innerscapes of history—God how
I wish I could escape that word—are the brown leaves clinging, the crepe myrtle heart,
The swathe of the storm, the hidden cotton rows secret,
Our forefathers’ and mothers’ sweat and sins, our birth and others’ scarred redemption.