Hitch-Hiking in the Dying South

I have seen the morning spread over the fields

           & I have walked on, trying to forget

how it seemed as if daybreak was founded

           on the most fragile web of breath,

& I had blown it.

           Then I thought it might not exist at all,

nor had it ever. That it was only the idea of breath

           & the egrets asleep in sour-grass were the idea

of flight, & if I was to breathe in,

it would all just disappear.

I have seen the spotted toads at dusk

           come up from the ditches after a rainstorm

& into the asphalt's steam & I have seen them

           crushed by lumber trucks, then lifted away

into the pines by the gathering crows.

           I have felt the night quiver with heron's wing

over the swamps, over wild pigs in a blackberry patch,

           their snouts bloody & alive in the moonlight,

& I have walked on, dirty, alone, kicking to the grasses

           the swollen bodies of possum, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, bobcat,

giving them no prayer, no peace-filled silence.

           But that was long ago, when work was scarce

& meant thumbing my way to the tobacco plant

           or the slaughterhouse, north up Highway 17

to Holly Ridge or down to Bulltail on 210,

           either way I would be shoveling something until dusk,

something soft & warm & beyond me.

And I would be glad for it.

Walking with that forgotten gesture wavering

           in the morning air, I felt that people

could come into the world in a place

           they could not at first even name,

& move through it finally, like the dawn,

           naming each thing until filled with a buoyancy,

a mist from the river's empty rooms.

Thumb of autumn, thumb of locust, thumb of every kissed lip.

I have seen a cow die under the wheels

           of a Cadillac going 60, & who's to say

what the cow got from this?

           Some would say a dignity, perhaps,

past the slaughterhouse

& the carcasses swimming the eaves.

           Or was it a punishment for nudging open

the gate-latch, the driver of the car

           in shock, mouthing cow, cow,

& the crows in the pines answering

           with the kind of sympathy my foreman used

when one of his line-workers

           cut off another finger in the shredder.

Son, at least you still got your arm.

           It's difficult to get this straight,

but there was a beauty to the sparks

           that spread out under the car, under the cow,

as they went from flesh to asphalt to flesh again:

           fireflies in the hollow of the hills:

a blanket of white petals from the tree of moon.

           A brief & miniature dawn began,

there on a summer night in the South

           I had come to love as part of myself,

the sparks clinging in the grass for a moment,

           unbearably bright, a confused moth nuzzling up

to the reflection of a flame shining in

the cow's one open eye.

Now that I think of it, there was maybe even

           a beauty in the cow's fat, white body, a peace

I would never know, as it took in the car,

lay down with it: calf soft: morning breath.

This peace had a body, it was caught up in the night,

           made from night, there on the shoulder of a road

so endless even the stars shrugged it off

& took the sparks as one of their own.