Georgia

Let's talk about the last time I saw

Red clay stuck to my shoes, it

(and the safety word is whiskey)

Was when we took a walk down to the river

Where I held my hand to heart

And marveled at all the ways

A place can change and remain

Utterly the same with

Only the memories of wet sneakers and

Dry socks in my pockets to

Mark the passage of a sandbar which somehow

Once felt like my salvation but has now

Patiently been scattered from existence by

A thousand day’s deposits

Of choking humidity sighing gently

Over a blanket-fort canopy of kudzu.

-

Georgia was once an ocean

And the air will not forget it -

For as long as I sit on the steps sipping PBR, it will

Rock on the porch and prattle to my skin about our

Spring mornings weeping like a fresh-cut cucumber

Which Momma has saved for later

In the fruit bowl with the bananas and a lime,

Which she says still have some life in them, then

Cast iron summer air waiting on a woodstove sky

For the deep roll of thunder and crickets

Thrumming expectantly in the dim evening, shrill seance

Raising damp ghosts from the baking tennis courts,

Which wander to the crabgrass to rest their cooling bones

In dawn’s light, where I will draw dew mandalas in the grass

On my walk to the bus breathing apple crisp fall

And sing quietly to the sleeping dogwoods

Until my song drops frozen from the air, my bellows

Pumping weary crystal spirits over sweetgum caltrops -

Gingerbread coronas frosted with winter’s white fingers.

Anyway - we stood there, Dad and I, on the bank of the river

-

In the prison bar shade of the pavilion's still fresh-looking

Pine beams pregnant with whatever it takes

To shield us indefinitely from the unrelenting sun,

Unlike the old bench which died crumbling on this hill

Under the fervent lashes of teenage hearts -

A lost record of passionate neglect -

As though the sawing of cicadas had worked

Their way through its burnished wood bones

With an ocean of cackling - their names and

Their promises scattered as thoroughly as southern stars,

As far beyond recollection as the ashes of burned leaves, as

Irrecoverable as my lost sandbank, that only

I see there, next to my tiny footprints leading

Into the ribbons of black silt slick with rainbows deglazed

From the skillet tarmac which make the water

Taste like old blood on our young tongues.

-

Anyway - meanwhile Dad tells a related story and

Momma stands off to the side eyeballing him just

How a hen eyeballs a dog ‘cause she

Isn't sure she's not being made a game of.

Momma hears echoes calling from every valley shadow

Of an entire life left on the other end of a

White-knuckled phone walking with calm certainty away

Until its knotted and twisted curling cable snaps and leaves it void

Of everything, except which that man did not care to take -

Apparently just me in her arms and the granite heart of her dignity -

A Stone Mountain polished smooth by eons of her glacial tears

To carve out glorious injustices upon, to rise and rise again.

Whereas when life gives Dad lemons I think

He smells an old fashioned on his father's breath asking

If he wants to know what's wrong

And Pop told me Dad said, ‘no,’ because

He said he thought, ‘it would only make me sad like you,’

Which might have been when he wallpapered over the water stains

In his eyes so he could squint into the rising and setting sun, presumably

To help us chart our course, to avoid toll roads at any cost.

-

Momma confides later that

If she seemed off it was only that

She was hearing the distant screams of

Our neighbor when she found her daughter gently

Swinging from those sturdy pine beams - so perhaps a sound

Can cut bone with time, after all, my sternum snaps with the recollection

Of Momma’s sharp tutting to the kitchen windowpane, watching her

Small form whispering over the pinestraw after school

Darting through our yard to get to the park, carrying

The tangy aroma of hot, damp mulch on her heels - tut - which

Crush the annuals as she ducks the fists of crepe myrtles - tut -

Which will leave dead spots - tut - where the yard people just

Blanketed the cracked, rusty earth with this year's

Hopeful generation of grass seeds which wither and struggle

To make a home for themselves in the ever-sinking pit where the depleted,

Leather-brown builders buried their Gatorade bottles and Doritos bags -

-

Tut - I know how my mother feels about sneaky children. How that

Sound now divests some part of me, knowing the volume of pain

A child can gather in such manicured gardens of aspiration. How it drives

My small shadow into the crack in the driveway which yawns for that darkness -

Eager to follow and rest my own head down by the river with her and

Eager to disappear forever into the only wild our feet alone could reach -

Where I could lie on the bench, gaze clear to Orion through tulip poplars

Waving gently in the warm night breeze, and find some small peace,

And where she would gaze up through these pine prison bars,

Which sobers my heart to know how little hope

I would tolerate, and how it might have been me first

If only there had been shade to stand under

If only my sanctuary had been just

That much more deafeningly meagre with

Its performance of comfort

And its appearance of beauty

(whiskey)