Because the man at the fruit stand knows Mama
from a lifetime ago, he fetches her a basket
fresh off the tractor’s back. Leaving the orchard,
she tells me what the trees have seen.
The spring before she arrived,
one Skinner boy shot the other
through a clearing in their boughs
which at that time of year were blossom-blushed
such that when buckshot rang through the boy
it dotted the peach petals with scarlet
not unlike the mark on a dogwood flower
which my grandmama says is a kind of stigmata,
though she wouldn’t put it like that,
too lofty a word for a thing as solid as faith, or a tree.
Why? I ask Mama and she looks at me the way
Grandmama looks at her new husband
when he asks if Carolina wrens live round these parts,
bewildered, as if to say, Don’t you know where you are?
Here where cousin Dewey killed a man in a bar fight
with a single punch.
Here where Mama’s junior prom date died at age sixteen
beneath a tractor wheel.
Here where grandmama divided the serpent’s head from its spine
with the blade of her gardening hoe.
Here where something was done to Aunt Lorraine
that she won’t speak of, even now,
except to say the body remembers what the mind lets go.
Here where everything and nothing grows.
Land of red clay, kudzu, whitetail, lightning bug.
Mama says due to development
the orchard gets smaller each year.
We cling to the earth’s jaw even as it yawns shut,
knowing all the same that we will be undone.
We were born with a taste for undoing.
