Dead so recently

those smatterings
below the curb,
the ones you run

past only to get
a better look,
so death

just happened
to be
on your route, already

simmering, all ready
to be worn
to a mat of fur

specked
with bone-splinters,
to be paved over

next summer;
you run by
but you remember

another time
when you were walking,
when you were sure

the roadkill
was roadkill
before it turned to you,

dragged its torso
around its broken legs
and opened its mouth

as if you could help it
to speak, and then
you ran again,

away from the dying
probably diseased
soon-to-be carcass

jawing at the breeze,
at you,
as you feel the slap

of blacktop pound
through your soles,
the chafe of sweat

on skin, eyes only
for the next step,
on pace, in stride,

running,
remembering
a day that you walked.

**

Doc Watson Could See

from stage through five-string eyes.
He flatpicked Dixie
while I drank warm beer
in an open field, learning
more about Deep Gap
with every catgut pluck
and baritone word. Not having
to look can’t be easier,
but seeing this Homer
of engine grease and pulled pork
staring blank over my head
to some line where the blue met
clay earth, made me close
my eyes to the crowd, knowing
only how one string could
find another, the melody’s float,
his voice’s droning swell.
Doc could see until he was one.
His song was everything
he hadn’t seen that I had,
towhees lighting on double grid
powerlines above tobacco fields,
hound dogs picking at roadkill,
confederate flag bumper stickers,
neon Cheerwine signs
at the Food Lion, church vans;
but we shared the sounds,
the y’alls and empty darlings,
gunshots falling from the trees
like hemlock needles,
the foreman’s stilted
Spanish calling to his hombres
where they were building
another new bank. After
he finished his set, someone
led Doc back through the curtain,
and I could feel the sky
and the city rising again
from the trampled down dirt.

**

Real South

It was leaving Monet’s Normandy
show at the North Carolina Museum of Art,
that I spotted the model boat,
Egyptian, almost six millennia old.

Black-bodied oarsmen were chained
with twine to the hull, a man
draped in white, driving them.
History of the world in miniature,
in the medium of slaves and masters,
grainstacks and Lilly pads,
wood, gesso, paint, and twine.

Driving home on route 52, tobacco
fields laid down along the pavement,
stretched out over the piedmont flats
like oil on canvas. Stopping for gas
there was a black man in an oil-smudged cap,
smoking a cigarette and tugging his brim
when he found my eyes, taking me in
with a slow drag. The cherry glowed
at the end of his lips, like the sun’s halo
pulsing around a haystack in the morning fog.
I could see it in his eyes, the gleam
of recognition as he looked me up, Yankee,
taking a tour only to go home, not knowing
I would sit in my study and write poems
about the real South, about him and paintings
he’d never seen of places that I’d never been.