Poetry for Springtime

Prose Poem for Alabama and Mary Etta and the 2008 Huntingdon Poetry Writing Class

I grew up, like she did, like you did, climbing trees wrapped in flowering vines. We share an Alabama childhood and a love of battle worn vegetation. Before waffle-bottom shoes, my sneakers would slip and slide down trunks and vines like a puck on ice, shaving away layers of skin from the tree and my legs. She moved to Florida and I to Texas, places where trees don’t have arms to hold us when flights crash. I’ll never forget my initial return home, the awe of first breath laden with those forgotten smells. Now years of wisteria-bloom buildup turns sour, and the odor haunts my footsteps through every child-filled neighborhood. Vines may seem to meander, but real Southerners know better: every season tightens the grip, strangling the oaks in favor of false grape bunches, and releases a shower of pollen-filled petals that float on wind currents like snow flakes. My stomach overturns an urge to pick one to take home. Bees swarm; their furious furry bodies dripping with rainwater and yellow dust. Underneath the suffocating shade, a dead squirrel buzzes with iridescent green flies. Sex and death: one melting into the other. I think of my class here, for a moment; they will revolt against this sentiment. They will say, There must be more to life than bees and maggots. Damn, though, if I can see beyond it or even the difference. Both hum like distant airplane engines taking off somewhere on asphalt, far away from red clay roads, moving crucial life-giving liquids from one place to another. Both are here, as I walk this paved street: stooped vines touch the same road that smashed the fuzzy squirrel. I’m too early for Magnolias, thick and sweet like butter and cane, and it’s too early for honeysuckle, delicate single drops of nectar. I settle for elephant-sized bright-pink azaleas and wisteria climbing to the top of massive power poles. Substitutions become commonplace. She died less than one week ago, and I was not there. I let the flowers bring the scent of her dead body to me. I kiss it goodbye. We cannot remember the dead fondly when we see them in the hide of flattened bony critters that only made it half way across the pavement. The dead must be honored with the fertilizing of seed, the feeding of a coming child. To drive the other away, the absolute zero of death, we fuck by candlelight. In homespun vases, flowers erupt. We either fight to get there or fight to forget it.