Caddy in Adelaide, from The Sound and the Fury



You offer me crab apples, lightning bugs, a red pick-up with a confederate flag

passing black men walking for miles, the gentle roll of the flat road

leading to some other county. I wrap the warmth of my body

around your great rivers, my hips and elbows curving with each bend.

I let clear water from creeks splash my skin, hold white pebbles

in my hand then pack them away for a time like now. 
I smell you, Mississippi, petals of honeysuckle wet like my own;

your name a soft stammer on my tongue, like a lover’s.

I romanticise you as wild and random: native honeybees

flirt in the juices of a full-bosomed magnolia tree

where in its branches the trill of a mockingbird, and over there

the sound of someone’s pleasure at three in the afternoon. 
Sassparilla, Chickasaw, loblolly pine, dead skunk. 
I can hear your guitar and your fiddle, your children and your unborn babies

the old stories – of mammies, of the fields, of dead brothers.