Self-Portrait in Charlottesville, Virginia

Biblioteca Rector Machado y Nuñez / Flickr

Self-Portrait in Charlottesville, Virginia

“Ruin is formal” 

- Emily Dickinson

a town of mouth-breathers seems to heave a green-singed breath

to test that the ground will swallow it and sigh back

and taste— how the train palms their names and sifts them out like sugar

cradled by hills that bitch in the morning before they’ve sipped from their dew-brimmed cup

And the road rolls its shoulder in a predictable potholed back-stretch 

shrugging off your mother’s tossed-back belly laugh sat in bed at 7am

what strangely keeps its supple grip: the pink-frilled trees that were supposed to be bushes

now they grin and head-nod gently downward, freshly naive and engaged 

In one of the more brittle moments, a buck dashes out, and blade scathes the emerald-sutured veil

ecstatic and wild, quickly muscle and pulse then brown bag on carnivorous gravel 

the world answers without pause, and the before is gulped up at the mouth 

some unintelligible feral then weights the roll-shoulder roads, and the walls curve.

Soil begins to tighten its mouth around the unsung graves 

and the morning coffees chime a slight rattle as air becomes stricken 

thickened, throngs of feet pad incessant over Serpentine Gardens and Vinegar Hill

keeping the ground fed and fed in a plea to swallow the flock of dead 

Brimming, the new mother smiles and tells her tea kettle of a child to stop squealing 

even the squirrel in the trashcan averts its eyes

I feel it rise— through the columns still— that red-faced, shrieking sweetness  

Choke

on how handsomely it holds