Rabbit Tobacco
 

[The Absurd South]
 
I. The End of Wilderness

Here is the mute stump on which you sat
to tie your shoes. Forgetting the fat

badger and claiming only the boar,
you bent to taste the stem of a four-

leafed clover. You got green on your hands
and almost forgot that too. The bands

of light, of morning slipping through leaves,
rend your ankles from your legs, relieves

you of such grievous weights—though really
the streaming sun all but framed you. See

the tortured roots. Smell your clothes and know
that only candy bar wrappers show

half as much composure.
 

II. Housekeeping

The tomcat, sodden as a lantern, spears
the yarn. House-like, he does not hear

bats, but a hornet’s nest in the attic:
feeling-out fishing reels and the automatic

coffee pot. Know this, that a cat always lands
beside himself: that to shred yellow bands

of yarn, or the hem of a child’s gown—
this is a found Easter egg that begs to own

itself. Inside a box of frying pans
sleeps a star: bright as a ceiling fan.
 

III. Lawn

A dandelion is nothing
to the power of the night,
the press of the storm,
the post of the lawnmower.

Take the dandelion’s solar head,
plucked from its body
for salads, for the amusement
of children.

Imagine their furry faces
turned upward to the sun,
gulping down great blocks of light,
drinking in the morning dew.

The accident of a man’s step,
the twist of heel,
is what the dandelion truly fears.
And the moon. They fear that as well.
 

[Leaving the South]

I. Summer

The day smelled of sun-
flowers and the un-

bridled reek of tar
as the yellow car,

a Fiat, streaked out
of Rome on the trout-

colored back of the autostrada.
 

II. Sage

Even when you speak the word,
it can only be as round as one leaf,
pressed by an Italian housewife’s fingers
into the naked form of a pheasant,

spread open like a drunk.
Salted, rubbed and oiled.
Or perhaps the word fits best
in the mouth of my Florentine waiter

who juggles it with salvia,
often forgetting that they are the same.
 

III. John the Expatriate

When I met him, a yellowjacket
swirled between us in the space
where words were not.

What a brilliant face,
sheened with deep sight,
rivered by years away from home.

Having fled Mississippi
for the bright stones of London,
what other voices have you lost?

How fortunate,
to be in-between words
as the air on a yellowjacket’s back.
 

[Reinventing the South]

I. Sundays

The smell of onions strides all through the den
in Nana’s house—scathing the low checkerboard

ceiling tiles, rubbing against her father’s
Bible and the china doll painted to look like

me: red corduroy overalls, an unkempt
bristle of hair, eyes that shine like a deer’s.

As Nana chops the young onion shoots,
fatback sighs in the pan, giving up

its little secret.
 

II. On Moving Back Home

The three-legged dog drags his shadow
past the broken fence. I sink further

into the wicker chair, the yellow porch light
dancing around its own fire pit, a mountain

standing on my head. In this town,
this tiny bit of gray, the river of my forgetting

slinks half-dead past the mail box.
 

III. Duck Creek

Dust shudders in the air, the railroad bed
barren as a Holstein. The muddied squelch of red

clay bootprints fill my head, or would.
I trail the dried footholes—a child

pressed these into the ground some days
past. I smell the creek’s gas-can rush, gaze

into a snake’s oval as I pass. Beyond thorn
brush and rabbit tobacco, the creek’s popcorn

rattle thrives: the soft chatter of water
over stone. I toss in a hand of quarters,

lean on the bridge’s bones to smoke.