About the Dead: Poems

Decampment

[1] D e C A M P M e n T ~Aynor, SC i. Long before the night my father and i hiked the rim of chicory and sedge that marked our property, generations of ghosts already meandered down the ephemeral streambeds’ smoothed cavities, making camp under colonies of black elm, cypress. We built a fire, and he told me stories: Kiawah, runaway slaves, Confederate or Union soldiers passing through—this year cotton, last year tobacco, lockjaw, gadfly sores, goat milk souring, bone shank in the horse trough. his great-grandfather edmund gave cornmeal, blankets, tourniquets, board or passage without question, let them rest awhile on his land, on this soil full of ache: bleeding, giving birth. e Twelve years old, burning daylight, i waited for my mother’s dinner call to scurry the quail from the fencerows. i kicked loose rocks in the dirt, hoped i’d find arrowheads, bullets or links of iron, gray as leaf-fire fading into a storm. This was where i first discovered exactly what this land was missing. [2] ii. The first night i thought a woman was getting raped, but by the third my father had me holding the light while he loaded buckshot. A screech owl had made its home in the magnolia near the work shed— my mother and sister Cora, waiting inside, listened to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the record player. Together, we stalked, patient for rustle or twitch to set our aim. Ten minutes passed, we figured it was done for the night and turned back toward the house, relieved of duty— then, inches over our heads, quiet as laundry gusting on the line, the owl flew past. My father didn’t blink, didn’t shoot. Must’ve been a ghost leaving, he said. iii. Mr. Jacobs, the deacon at church, taught me prayers to say before bed, blessings for the meatloaf, mashed potatoes, fried okra, and sweet bread. One year i prayed for rain every night just to see if it would take, but a dry wind set over us, drier than bone dust. i prayed the opposite, and it only got worse; at church, my father overheard the Kissee family whispering. During the night they packed up and left. [3] Then the other prayers started. each night: a field of red-winged blackbirds on fire, canker sores for the Pearson dogs, gadflies, thick and dark as molasses, sweeping Aynor off the map in a black rush. it became enough to watch them in my head, to see the lame mule sent to the guillotine and wake up without deference to the sun. iv. My father signed over the eastern swathes of land to gird the lien; Colin Pearson and i stole a bottle of whiskey from the diesel-plex glimmering near the off-ramp. Both of us were stupid drunk by the time we made it to the quarry and built a bonfire on the ledge. The moon in the pool below shattered with curses, with stones, with showers of embers. A train of empty boxcars slugged by before dawn and carried us back to Aynor like kings defeated. i threw up three times in a ditch, dunked my head into a bucket of rainwater, stepped inside, a new man. v. Overripe, i tumbled to the orchard floor. Mrs. Jacobs gathered me up with her apron, left me on the sill cooling all afternoon. Brother elm was kindling a fire. My father had brought the good axe. [4] i dreamed the night swallowed us down its rough tongue. Grace Kissee walking under a row of hackberry made me ache. I wanted to open her like a mason jar from the cellar hold— apple sluice, red wolf howl avalanching the valley’s winter gourd, petroglyphs, folktales, blue skies complicated with clouds. i dreamed a sharp knife with no leather. i dreamed black longings from the bluffs. i dreamed the sweet flag urged me knee-deep into the stream. vi. Forgive the girl, it wasn’t her fault. hitching three days with rotten luck, all she wanted was enough money for a motel room and a bus ticket west. Forgive the earth for not swallowing Colin and me and his truck and our deal for her, for Marcy, for the hot shower, for the clean clothes, for the fifty dollars we promised after she finished with both of us. Forgive me, when she pulled me...