Inter Alia, North Carolina Trees

Willow oaks melting into sidewalks,
propagating grass with daylong jokes,
or, listen, the American holly alive
with robins flitting quicksilver through
perpetual shadow as gray foxes set off
the rainstick music of pine needles,
repeating Civil War betrayals on the wind,
all that undying Gothic covering fields
of potatoes and strawberries, the antiseptic
truth burns like an oil refinery in Sanford,
there redbuds burst into sudden flame,
announcing spring is finally south,
even though the rain, Sweet Jesus,
ain’t really raining, only the world
gets heavier with blood echoing the clot
blossoms of crape myrtles, clouding,
mournful with the everlasting hum of bees,
echoing the highway traffic climbing
up Pilot Mountain, mulch murmur
vanishing completely like last season’s
wildfire that seared prophetic
through shortleaf pines, leaving behind,
undetonated, a biblical mass of cones
set deep in their revenant sleep, which here
is history becoming nature, rushing toward
ruin, a place frozen in time to specter
dreams of paradise, that slanting, endless
regress signalling grief is also a mode
of love—look again, cabbage palmettos
turn into smoke at sunrise and beech
leaves splinter into an enormous calm,
the Appalachia of the mind bristling
with stout branched thorns against sins,
the worst kind of poverty flaking across
county lines dotted with billboards
promising JUDGMENT IS COMING
and guns, fast food, and veteran care
while the trails tether with opioids,
scattering white blossoms fallen
from dying black locusts, their rich,
death-haunted scent seeping into everything,
stubborn as blankness and wavering
evergreens, a scent more cruel for being
nothing, or almost nothing, unlike
the lustrous burden of the great old
southern magnolia seen at noon, its blunt
galvanized sheen distorting itself into
a Medusa rage, the haptic wave of roots
crashing down onto the earth and surging
back into the air, twisting into a hideout
for the dead and two young lovers
spread out on the grass, lulled by the thrum
of construction machines, some blighted
with drying flowers and leaves, crunching
under their feet a warning when they rise
to go, quietly, like bondage to inertia,
but listen again they might be singing
as they circle the magnolia to the path,
wondering will they break up or coalesce?
Who knows, what matters is that in these
times they are singing, they better be singing.