Southern Gothic

About the dead having available to them

all breeds of knowledge,

some pure, others wicked, especially what is

future, and the history that remains

once the waters recede, revealing the land

that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land

that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived

as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived,

simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said

they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences

silences: sometimes a boy will slip

from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why,

sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.