Anodyne

I

Just north of Ward, South Carolina,
the pong of the paper mill writhes
the air southward,

across the orchards, all the way
to Johnston,
where creeks coil

through their motions;
small seeps carry through ditches
to and from my father’s pond,

where catfish ripple
across the bottom, stir up
delicate skeletons

of their forebears. A stray dog,
wolflike, with a snout long and fierce,
with a lip piece bitten and torn

from the bone so the teeth
forever snarl through that terrified life,
wails the tree line to prayer.

Up toward McCormick, a fire gnaws
through understory, destroys, renews.
The ash crosses

four counties.

II

When I rise in the lonely hours
of the predawn, and the violet blossom
of fear turns in my stomach,

I hear my grandfather’s voice.
I smell the cedar tang of his small house
in Troutman, North Carolina.

He told me once that, while fighting
in Iwo Jima, down deep in a trench canopied
in gunfire and the screams of the dying,

he saw a Japanese man’s face
detach from the front of his skull
and fall like a huge, soggy leaf

down the hole to land on his shoulder,
the eyebrows and mouth still intact,
a grisly mask.

Later, on Honshu, a crazed boy
from Idaho threatened
to slit his throat

if he didn’t let the boy piss first in a bunker.
So my grandfather let him pass,
walked a few steps back,

and turned to see the boy explode
on a mine, a shard of metal
flying out of the jet of viscera

to lodge deep in his arm.

III

When I am angry, envy
grinding my body
down to burl,

I think of the sweat drenching
my grandfather’s face, searing his eyes,
as he tried to rest

in the cover of scant trees
while shells boomed just a mile
downriver.

Then the rage shrinks in me,
and I notice how the wind sends
the high branches

to song. I notice how the trees scroll
through words of their own hidden language,
a lexicon behind perception,

a grammar of silences
that belies the violence
pulsing through our kind.

IV

Down here in Johnston,
just east of the Savannah,
the iron-red snake that winds

between Georgia and Carolina, peaches
amplify under skies thrummed with bees,
attuned to field, bough, flower—

sometimes frost-silenced,
sometimes urged
to sweetness, the fruit

swollen wombs. Sometimes
the tongue cannot rejoice;
sometimes the psalms

of August shrivel
the heart to knot. So down
here, when summers growl

and scald creek-mouths
dry, hiss afternoons
with sudden storms, I watch

the woods and water for least gestures,
pray to know the singing
of the fox or kingfisher, elm or bream,

so that nights
when I can’t sleep—deprived
of the one voice

I long to hear—
I can ride out those creatures’
compound melodies,

their one and only hymn.