I.
Little girl, enjoy the creeks
While you can. Cup the murky water
Teeming with mollusks, white crappies
Brushing past your bare feet. Thickets of loblolly
Pine line the valley back to the house
You will leave.
It is only human, baby, to want
The honey without the bees’ racket, summer
Rain with no morning slugs. Like raccoons,
We get what we can take. We leave what we can
Not. Up north somewhere, Morrison
Writes of the thin thread between cosmopolitan
And lonely. On a plane that never lands,
You will scratch mosquito bites to the blood.
II.
And in the bark of the sweetgum
In the middle of the forest
In the version of the world
Where you did not leave—did
Not can the wren’s call widening
‘Cross sky like breath for wet paint
On park benches, singular honey
Locust given its street plot—you
Carve a wound just to watch sap
Fill the gash like spit might a mouth,
Children a silence. The origin of the urge
Unclear as the tree’s proclivity
For hemorrhage, how it stands to gain
From such amber losing.
When I violence, I never know
What came first: destruction
Or the impulse to injure. I do know
A landscape changes a person like weather
A flight pattern, and I am no safer
Than the soil staining my soles, at any moment
Given to floodwater. I couldn’t leave this land
If I left it. I am honey-scented. Thick-throated
Sparrow, heavy with treesong. To what do you
Owe the most allegiance, Morrison asks in the book
On the shelf in the room that was always
My room, haunting me
With its stipple ceiling, and I say peace, say
My mother, say the dust we will become,
How it scatters itself
Everywhere.
