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Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile. — E. O. Wilson I returned to a stand of pines, bone-thin phalanx flanking the roadside, tangle of understory—a dialectic of dark and light—and magnolias blossoming like afterthought: each flower a surrender, white flags draped among the branches. I returned to land’s end, the swath of coast clear cut and buried in sand: mangrove, live oak, gulfweed razed and replaced by thin palms— palmettos—symbols of victory or defiance, over and over marking this vanquished land. I returned to a field of cotton, hallowed ground— as slave legend goes—each boll holding the ghosts of generations: those who measured their days by the heft of sacks and lengths of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants still sewn into our clothes. I returned to a country battlefield where colored troops fought and died— Port Hudson where their bodies swelled and blackened beneath the sun—unburied until earth’s green sheet pulled over them, unmarked by any headstones. Where the roads, buildings, and monuments are named to honor the Confederacy, where that old flag still hangs, I return to Mississippi, state that made a crime of me—mulatto, half-breed—native in my native land, this place they’ll bury me.

Her red dress & hat tease the sky’s level- headed blue. Outside a country depot, she could be a harlot or saint on Sunday morning. We know Hopper could slant light till it falls on our faces. She waits for a tall blues singer whose twelve-string is hours out of hock, for a pullman porter with a pigskin wallet bulging with greenbacks, who stepped out of Porgy at intermission. This is paradise made of pigment & tissue, where apples ripen into rage & lust. In a quick glance, beyond skincolor, she’s his muse, his wife— the same curves to her stance, the same breasts beneath summer cloth.

After the whey-faced anonymity Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush, After the rubbing and the hit of brush, You come to the South Country As if the argument of trees were done, The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains, All ended by these clear and gliding planes Like an abrupt solution. And over the flat earth of empty farms The monstrous continent of air floats back Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black, Bruised flesh of thunderstorms: Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge, Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light, So huge, from such infinities of height, You walk on the sky’s beach While even the dwindled hills are small and bare, As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful, Something below pushed up a knob of skull, Feeling its way to air.

Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies Behold the Spirit of the musky South, A creole with still-burning, languid eyes, Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth: Swathed in spun gauze is she, From fibres of her own anana tree. Within these sumptuous woods she lies at ease, By rich night-breezes, dewy cool, caressed: ’Twixt cypresses and slim palmetto trees, Like to the golden oriole’s hanging nest, Her airy hammock swings, And through the dark her mocking-bird yet sings. How beautiful she is! A tulip-wreath Twines round her shadowy, free-floating hair: Young, weary, passionate, and sad as death, Dark visions haunt for her the vacant air, While noiselessly she lies With lithe, lax, folded hands and heavy eyes. Full well knows she how wide and fair extend Her groves bright flowered, her tangled everglades, Majestic streams that indolently wend Through lush savanna or dense forest shades, Where the brown buzzard flies To broad bayous ’neath hazy-golden skies. Hers is the savage splendor of the swamp, With pomp of scarlet and of purple bloom, Where blow warm, furtive breezes faint and damp, Strange insects whir, and stalking bitterns boom— Where from stale waters dead Oft looms the great jawed alligator’s head. Her wealth, her beauty, and the blight on these,— Of all she is aware: luxuriant woods, Fresh, living, sunlit, in her dream she sees; And ever midst those verdant solitudes The soldier’s wooden cross, O’ergrown by creeping tendrils and rank moss. Was hers a dream of empire? was it sin? And is it well that all was borne in vain? She knows no more than one who slow doth win, After fierce fever, conscious life again, Too tired, too weak, too sad, By the new light to be or stirred or glad. From rich sea-islands fringing her green shore, From broad plantations where swart freemen bend Bronzed backs in willing labor, from her store Of golden fruit, from stream, from town, ascend Life-currents of pure health: Her aims shall be subserved with boundless wealth. Yet now how listless and how still she lies, Like some half-savage, dusky Indian queen, Rocked in her hammock ’neath her native skies, With the pathetic, passive, broken mien Of one who, sorely proved, Great-souled, hath suffered much and much hath loved! But look! along the wide-branched, dewy glade Glimmers the dawn: the light palmetto trees And cypresses reissue from the shade, And she hath wakened. Through clear air she sees The pledge, the brightening ray, And leaps from dreams to hail the coming day.

Who ever thinks this is impossible shall only have a look on the glass, which is similar to you — Monk of the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas at Arnstein, 
 late twelfth century, tr. by Roger Rosewell 1 In the high left light there’s a bombast figure of the iconoclast Harley — titled Chairman of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry — in operation mid 1600s. In forgiveness is lightly engraved in the grisaille glass near the base. His jig-on-coals is illumined to the foot: in the light below, skin-fierce shards of thousanded glass are oblite against an anvil road black as a telly that’s off. 2 Here the sanctity of the inextinct is vitrified. (There is in this, of course, the trick of the numinous, which apertures the mind then shutters it with a captured click.) The second window is abstracted into a green / yellow / red that’s near tessellated at points, yet at its edges approaching random generation like a screen saver projected. It is infernal. This color chart dispersal, that’s disordering or reordering. 3 Then a spurt of leading leads out of the plaster tracery, these cames a cooled ore rooting Lowhampton’s industry to a silica-limed wall — and the metal hid within a retrace of all the city’s greatness that’s gone before. Though now is lost. There is at last the moving off from the abstract; a tilting to the concrete: it seems, right here, that a hundred buildings are storied in stone-thrown perspective. A city reinvented. 4 In four: a clear-paned gemmail connecting like-to-like, with no change of  tint or shape, no supporting leadlight. It’s as if it were a house window. Or something from an office block. It does not create or stain but gives an outside falling past Sainsbury’s and the Sander Tower looming, then the ring road communioned traffic forming. An open room pupiled towards rain in its rain-tone, the study of an unaltared sun.

In the backyard of my father’s house a hen’s warm neck once filled the center of my pale fist. Her place on the stump still wears my shadow like a stain.

About the dead having available to them all breeds of knowledge, some pure, others wicked, especially what is future, and the history that remains once the waters recede, revealing the land that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived, simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences silences: sometimes a boy will slip from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why, sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.

What sudden ill the world await, From my dear residence I roam; I must deplore the bitter fate, To straggle from my native home. The verdant willow droops her head, And seems to bid a fare thee well; The flowers with tears their fragrance shed, Alas! their parting tale to tell. ’Tis like the loss of Paradise, Or Eden’s garden left in gloom, Where grief affords us no device; Such is thy lot, my native home. I never, never shall forget My sad departure far away, Until the sun of life is set, And leaves behind no beam of day. How can I from my seat remove And leave my ever devoted home, And the dear garden which I love, The beauty of my native home? Alas! sequestered, set aside, It is a mournful tale to tell; ’Tis like a lone deserted bride That bade her bridegroom fare thee well. I trust I soon shall dry the tear And leave forever hence to roam, Far from a residence so dear, The place of beauty—my native home.

I would like to take something with me but even one chair is too awkward too heavy peeling paint falls off in a suitcase hinge sounds betray a theft cheeses won’t keep the clothespin without its surroundings would be mediocre the big thunder rolled elsewhere the umbrella is for sale but in a desert what you want is a soaking the do not disturb sign is tattered I have many times taken some cafe’s small packets of sugar so that in Turkey I might sweeten my coffee with China, and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry but where is the coffee hands left and right useless knees clattery heart finally calm as some hero at the end of a movie squinting silently into the sun you can’t hold an umbrella there anyhow and what would he hang from the clothespin

a sower walks into the great hall it's war out there, he says and you awash in emptiness you've sworn off your duty to sound the alarm I've come in the name of fields it's war out there I walk out from that great hall all four directions a boundless harvest scene I start planning for war rehearsing death and the crops I burn send up the wolf-smoke of warning fires but something haunts me furiously: he's sowing seed across marble floors