Pastoral

I come you to asking to question the landscape of our pastoral muse. [...] What frees you to write odes of the low country of America, to mention the trees and not their wicked history . . . ?

— Danez Smith, We Must Be the New Guards: Open Letter to White Poets


I wheel south: farm-road bound by dead
birches, fingers from gouged soil,
a pockmarked church at the bend of a spur,
its splintering sign reading Norwood, white
paint shedding like snakeskin, preacher’s
name gashed to pulp. A dead racoon
bloats beneath a pew. Behind the chapel,
a cemetery and through its contorted archway,
canine-toothed headstones choked
by nettle grass, cudweed, bittercress,
their epitaphs from the 1860s, like my father’s
family cemetery in Louisiana, a cotton town
I visited once as a child, watched the three-volley
salute lower Papaw to the floodplain.
In my ancestor’s graves lie the bones
of slave owners, men who drank themselves
to death for generations, afloat in a landlocked sea
of whiskey and cotton. In Norwood's buzzing
flies I hear distant chanting congregations
and then the strike of draw-hoe to soil, field hollers
thunderous, blue. From the steeple, a cloud
of cardinals spills across amber dusk like bourbon,
like blood. What would I have heard back then,
unstitched by liquor? What music-turned-thorn?

Removal

When I was twelve, my father
pulled me from school to watch
the detonation of the Embrey Dam.
We arrived early, sat on
the riverbank and sipped
sodas by the yellow caution tape
while the National Guard drilled
dynamite into the concrete
and wired explosive
nodes down to the nineteenth-century
wooden substructure. Neighbors milled
about their yards in shirts printed
with Dam Blasted Party, fired
up their grills and rolled
kegs into buckets of ice.
One of Dad’s friends chatted
with a journalist. Through the sound
of water rushing the spillways,
I overheard phrases like free,
failed experiment, bad idea,
and the future. The words peppered
the next day's paper.
He was right though: the dam was always
shortsighted, never useful—
built in the age of the railroad
to secure a system
of canals, it was obsolete before
it was finished, bankrupt
in just five years.
Yet, for nearly two centuries
the migratory path of shad
remained blocked by the greed
of men who cared little
for these seemingly small lives
that for millennia had braved
this once-raging vein between
the mountains and the sea.
But in just under a minute
the dam was gone.
The champagne bottles popped,
the ribs sizzled, and the river flowed
unbound across the concrete bones
of its captor. Today, however, I stand
in a different crowd as Richmond cranes
the statue of Robert E. Lee
from its graffitied pedestal.
Someone lights up a grill,
someone else pours champagne.
The operators saw
loose the bronze torso and use
the neck to lift the gut
from the hips; they pose it in mid-air
for pictures, its hung head
and trunk dangling jaggedly over
detached legs and horse.
Someone shouts Giddyup loser!
Our laughter flows
through this freshly scythed
space. And yes, this is only
symbolic. And yes, true change
is a social process. But, I’ve heard that
in the mountains upstream
for the first time in decades
the shad are beginning to flourish.