Hitchhiking In The Dying South Poem by Joshua Poteat

I have seen the morning spread over the fields
and I have walked on, trying to forget
how it seemed as if daybreak was founded
on the most fragile web of breath,
and 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
and the egrets asleep in sourgrass were the idea
of flight, and 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
and into the asphalt's steam and 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,
and I have walked on, dirty, alone, kicking to the grasses
the swollen bodies of possum, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon,
giving them no prayer, no peace-filled silence.

But that was long ago, when work was scarce
and I thumbed 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 and warm and 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,
and 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 sixty, and who's to say
what the cow got from this?
Some would say a dignity, perhaps,
past the slaughterhouse
and 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,
and 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 and 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
and took the sparks as one of their own.