For the South

I hate your hills white with dogwood or pink with redbud in spring as if you invented hope, as if in the middle of red clay, limestone outcroppings, and oak trees dead with fungus something slight and beautiful should make us smile. I hate the way honeysuckle drapes fences, blooms in the ditch where everyone dumps garbage; the evening air sweet with cedar and fields of burley; the way irises and buttercups mark the old dimensions of a house destroyed a hundred years ago; how a span of Queen Anne’s lace rocks the whole moon, and the sumac runs dark against the hill. I hate the drawl, the lazy voice saying I’ve been away so long I sound like I’m from nowhere; the old hand gathering snowballs or peonies or forking up an extra dish of greens, bitter, just the way I like them.