I.

Little girl, enjoy the creeks

While you can. Cup the murky water

Teeming with mollusks, white crappies

Brushing past your bare feet. Thickets of loblolly

Pine line the valley back to the house

You will leave.

It is only human, baby, to want

The honey without the bees’ racket, summer

Rain with no morning slugs. Like raccoons,

We get what we can take. We leave what we can

Not. Up north somewhere, Morrison

Writes of the thin thread between cosmopolitan

And lonely. On a plane that never lands,

You will scratch mosquito bites to the blood.

II.

And in the bark of the sweetgum

In the middle of the forest

In the version of the world

Where you did not leave—did

Not can the wren’s call widening

‘Cross sky like breath for wet paint

On park benches, singular honey

Locust given its street plot—you

Carve a wound just to watch sap

Fill the gash like spit might a mouth,

Children a silence. The origin of the urge

Unclear as the tree’s proclivity

For hemorrhage, how it stands to gain

From such amber losing.

III.

When I violence, I never know

What came first: destruction

Or the impulse to injure. I do know

A landscape changes a person like weather

A flight pattern, and I am no safer

Than the soil staining my soles, at any moment

Given to floodwater. I couldn’t leave this land

If I left it. I am honey-scented. Thick-throated

Sparrow, heavy with treesong. To what do you

Owe the most allegiance, Morrison asks in the book

On the shelf in the room that was always

My room, haunting me

With its stipple ceiling, and I say peace, say

My mother, say the dust we will become,

How it scatters itself

Everywhere.